The New Optimum Nutrition Bible

by Patrick Holford

  Acetylcholine is made by the action of choline, an enzyme dependent on vitamin B5. The combination of B5 and choline has proved effective in enhancing memory and mental performance. The best supplemental source of choline is lecithin, which also supplies phospholipids. Lecithin is an emulsifier that is also used in some foods. All health food stores stock it, either as capsules or as granules that can easily be sprinkled on food. However, not all lecithin is the same. Look at the label before you buy, and make sure the product contains more than 30 percent phosphatidyl choline.

  One problem with supplementing any form of choline is that it does not readily enter brain cells. This is why large quantities—around a tablespoon of lecithin granules a day—are needed to have an effect.

  Another nutrient found in fish, particularly in anchovies and sardines, is DMAE (dimethylaminoethanol), which does pass easily into the brain and can be converted into choline to make acetylcholine. DMAE has been shown to elevate mood, improve memory, increase intelligence and physical energy, and extend the life of laboratory animals. One of the pioneers of DMAE therapy, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, found it to be an excellent slow-acting stimulant and an alternative to antidepressants. It is currently being researched for its effects on extending lifespan. As one person on DMAE said, “I am more awake when I’m awake, and more sound asleep when I’m asleep. Not only does my memory improve, but I have an easier time daydreaming when I want to, and concentrating on real-world tasks when I want to.”

  The positive effects of supplementing another important phospholipid, phosphatidyl serine (PS), are equally amazing. In one study, supplementing PS improved the subjects’ memories to the level of people twelve years younger. Dr. Thomas Crook from the Memory Assessment Clinic in Bethesda, Maryland, gave 149 people with age-associated memory impairment a daily dose of 300 mg of PS or a placebo. When tested after twelve weeks, the ability of those taking PS to match names to faces (a recognized measure of memory and mental function) had vastly improved.9

  Smart nutrients

  The buzzword in brain enhancement is “nootropics”—substances derived from an amino acid called pyroglutamate that is found in fruit and vegetables. The discovery that the brain and cerebrospinal fluid contain large amounts of pyroglutamate led to its investigation as an essential brain nutrient. Doctors prescribe nootropic drugs, which are chemical variations of pyroglutamate, to millions of people every year for memory-deficit problems. Their basic effect is to improve learning, memory consolidation, and memory retrieval, all without toxicity or side effects.

  One extraordinary finding was that nootropics promote the flow of information between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The left brain is associated with analytical, logical thinking and the right brain with creative, relational thinking. This is thought to be a possible reason why nootropics have proved helpful in the treatment of dyslexia. A study published in 1988 by Dr. Pilch and colleagues suggests that nootropics may increase the number of acetylcholine receptors in the brain, thereby improving the brain’s efficiency.10 Older mice were given piracetam, a pyroglutamate derivative, for two weeks. The researchers found that these mice subsequently had a 30 to 40 percent higher density of receptors. This suggests that pyroglutamate-like molecules not only maximize mental performance but also may have a regenerative effect on the nervous system.

  The synergy factor

  The effects of enhancing mental performance through supplementation of “smart nutrients” such as omega-3 fats, phosphatidyl choline, PS, pantothenic acid, DMAE, and pyroglutamate are likely to be far greater when these substances are taken in combination than when they are taken individually. In one study in 1981, a team of researchers led by Raymond Barrus gave choline and piracetam to elderly laboratory rats, which are noted for age-related memory decline.11 They found that “rats given the piracetam/choline combination exhibited [memory] retention scores several times better than those with piracetam alone.”11 Only half the dose was needed when piracetam and choline were combined.

  I supplement a brain-food formula every day that gives me all of these—phosphatidyl choline, PS, DMAE, pyroglutamate, and pantohenic acid, as well as omega-3 fats. I also eat fish and organic or free-range eggs from chickens fed omega-3-rich feed. You can find these omega-3-rich eggs in most supermarkets.

  The brain drain

  While “good” chemicals and nutrients can improve mental function, “bad” chemicals can and do reduce your intelligence. Alcohol is a prime example. Coffee, while commonly thought to improve concentration, actually diminishes it. A number of studies have shown that the ability to remember lists of words is made worse by caffeine. According to one researcher, Dr. Erikson, “Caffeine may have a deleterious effect on the rapid processing of ambiguous or confusing stimuli,” which sounds like a description of modern living! The combination of caffeine and alcohol slows reaction time and, in one study, made subjects more drunk than alcohol alone. Caffeine is present in coffee, tea, chocolate, Red Bull, cola drinks, and the herb guarana.

  A diet high in sugar and refined carbohydrates, as discussed earlier, is another factor that reduces intelligence. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the higher the intake of refined carbohydrates, the lower the IQ. In fact, the difference between the high-sugar consumers and the low-sugar consumers was a staggering 25 points!12 Sugar has been implicated in aggressive behavior,13 anxiety,14 hyperactivity and attention-deficit disorder,15 depression,16 eating disorders,17 fatigue,18 learning difficulties,19 and PMS ratings.

  Heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and aluminum accumulate in the brain and have been clearly demonstrated to reduce intelligence, concentration, memory, and impulse control. Therefore, keeping pollution to a minimum, which includes not smoking, is another prerequisite to boosting your brainpower.

  Guidelines for improving your memory and mental performance

  Reduce your intake of stimulants such as coffee, tea, chocolate, and cola and of sugar and refined foods.

  Minimize your exposure to pollution and cigarettes.

  Make sure you are “well oiled” with regular fish, seeds, their oils, or essential fat supplements.

  Eat omega-3-rich eggs—at least four a week.

  Ensure that you achieve optimum nutrition through your diet and by taking a high-dose multivitamin and mineral supplement.

  Take daily supplements of smart nutrients: pantothenic acid 100 to 500 mg; choline 500 to 1,000 mg (or as one heaping teaspoon of high-phosphatidyl-choline lecithin granules); phosphatidyl serine (PS) 30 to 100 mg; DMAE 100 to 500 mg; pyroglutamate 250 to 750 mg.

  29

  Increasing Your Energy and Resistance to Stress

  As a nutritionist, the two most common complaints I hear from my clients are that they lack energy and are under too much stress. The net result is tiredness, exhaustion, lethargy, apathy, poor concentration, lack of motivation—whatever expression you use, the feeling is the same. Many people turn to sugary food, coffee, or cigarettes or become “adrenaline junkies” with high-powered jobs or exhilarating pastimes to regain this feeling of energy. Yet often these attempted solutions only generate more stress, and soon they feel out of control and stressed-out on the roller coaster of life. Stress is one of the most common health problems, associated with a wide variety of illnesses and accounting for the loss of 200 million working days a year in the U.S. But what has it got to do with nutrition?

  One surprising result that emerged from a survey of patients seen at the Institute for Optimum Nutrition clinic was that, before consulting a nutritionist, 54 percent of them scored high on a questionnaire concerning their ability to cope with stress, yet within six months of starting their optimum nutrition regimes only 28 percent still had a high stress rating. For the rest, whatever happened during those six months improved their ability to cope.

  The chemistry of stress

  Your body chemistry changes fundamentally every time you react stressfully. Stress starts in the mind. We perceive a
situation as requiring our immediate attention—a young child stepping into the road, a car driving too close to us, a hostile reaction from a colleague, a financial crisis, an impossible deadline. Rapid signals stimulate the adrenal glands to produce adrenaline. Within seconds, your heart is pounding, your breathing changes, stores of glucose are released into the blood, the muscles tense, the eyes dilate, even the blood thickens. You are ready for fight or flight—the average adrenaline rush of a commuter stuck in a traffic jam is enough to keep her running for a mile. That represents how much glucose is released, mainly by breaking down glycogen held in muscles and the liver.

  To get the fuel into the body, the pancreas releases two hormones, insulin and glucagon. Insulin, aided by a substance released from the liver, glucose tolerance factor, helps carry the fuel out of the blood; glucagon replenishes the blood sugar if its levels get too low. All this happens as a result of a stressful thought. Where, you might wonder, does all this extra energy and increased alertness come from? The answer is from a diversion of energy from the body’s normal repair and maintenance jobs such as digesting, cleansing, and rejuvenating. So every moment you spend in a state of stress speeds up the aging process in your body. It is stressful just thinking about it!

  The effects of prolonged stress are even more insidious than that. Imagine your pituitary, adrenals, pancreas, and liver perpetually pumping out hormones to control blood sugar that you do not even need. Like a car driven too fast, the body goes out of balance and parts start to wear out. Levels of the antiaging adrenal hormone start to fall, as do those of Cortisol, and before long your body simply cannot respond to stress as it used to.

  The blood sugar blues

  As a consequence, your energy level drops, you lose concentration, get confused, suffer from bouts of “brain fatigue,” fall asleep after meals, get irritable, freak out, cannot sleep, cannot wake up, sweat too much, get headaches … sound familiar? In an attempt to regain control, most people turn to stimulants. Legal stimulants include coffee (containing theobromine, theophylline, and caffeine), tea (containing caffeine), cola drinks (containing caffeine), chocolate (containing caffeine and theobromine), cigarettes (containing nicotine), and psychological stimulants such as horror films or bungee jumping—something to put you on the edge. Illegal stimulants include amphetamines and other “uppers,” cocaine, crack, and crime. Naturally, it becomes increasingly difficult to relax while living on stimulants, so most people learn to use relaxants such as alcohol, sleeping pills, tranquilizers, cannabis, and so on.

  Addicted to stress

  Of course, you cannot live like this forever, so most people burn out and have to head for the beach to recover. Yet as they wait in the airport, what better way to relax than by reading a paperback thriller? The cover promises “murder, mystery, greed, lust, gripping suspense.” Sounds good. Backed up by a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, and a stressful journey, they arrive ready for the beach. Then, after two blissful hours engrossed in raunchy pulp fiction on the beach, it is time for some excitement—windsurfing, waterskiing, something exhilarating. The point is that most people become addicted to stress, because without it they come crashing down, revealing their true state of adrenal exhaustion. This is why people feel exhausted or get ill when they take time off.

  TEST YOUR STRESS—SYMPTOMS LINKED WITH ADRENAL IMBALANCE

  Hard to get up in the morning

  Tired all the time

  Craving certain foods

  Anger, irritability, aggressiveness

  Mood swings

  Restlessness

  Poor concentration

  Poor sleep patterns

  Rapid or pounding heartbeat

  Prone to catching flu or colds

  Muscle and joint aches

  Spotty skin

  Allergies

  Hair loss

  Yeast overgrowth

  Hard-to-shift fat around waist

  Hungry all the time

  Difficulty in making decisions

  Poor memory

  Energy slump during the day

  Regular feelings of weakness

  Apathy

  Depression

  Feeling cold all the time

  Headaches

  Hyperactivity

  Frequent sore throats

  Poor wound healing

  Water retention

  PMS

  Watery or itchy eyes

  Excessive sweating

  Bloated feeling

  Faintness

  If you have three or more of the symptoms printed in bold type, you may have an adrenal hormonal imbalance. If you also have five or more of the other symptoms, this warrants investigation by a nutritionist.

  Energy consumers

  Yet in a very real sense, all stressors and stimulants consume our energy The “high” is literally energy leaving the system, like a wave that breaks and seems for a few seconds to be full of energy. Yet a few seconds later there is no wave at all—likewise the energy is gone.

  In an article on drug abuse, psychologist and philosopher Oscar Ichazo says, “Drugs (all of them) can be characterized as ‘energy consumers,’ consuming energy at a rate much greater than our natural ability to replace it. As drugs burn all our accumulated vitality in short periods of time, the brief exaltation is inevitably followed by depletion of vital energy, felt as the ‘down,’ the depressant effect of drugs. Nothing can replace a natural, clean body capable of producing natural and clean vital energy.”20 He rates the drugs most damaging to our vital energy, in descending order of harmfulness, as alcohol, heroin and opiates, tobacco, cocaine, barbiturates, antidepressants, amphetamines, marijuana, and caffeine.

  But what does it mean to “consume energy”? It means that body cells are starved of fuel nutrients like glucose and catalyst nutrients like B vitamins, which drive the enzyme systems necessary to release energy from fuel nutrients. The nutrients necessary to make messenger molecules like neurotransmitters, or carrier molecules like insulin, are also depleted. So every moment you spend in a stressful state you are using up valuable nutrients. Consider this: Have you ever had a massage, after which you felt as if a whole load of muscular tension had gone? Every single muscle cell that you hold in tension, often for decades, even when you are asleep, is consuming energy, B vitamins, vitamin C, calcium, and magnesium—to name but a few—just to stay in that state of tension. If you could relax all the muscles in your body, think how much you would save in nutritional supplements! Conservative estimates suggest that you double your need for vitamins when you are in a stressed state.

  The energy equation

  If you want to maximize your available energy for life, and to retain that energy rather than burning out, the nutritional message is simple:

  Eat slow-releasing carbohydrates—ones that release their “fuel” slowly.

  Ensure you have optimal intakes of all essential nutrients—vitamins, minerals, and others.

  Avoid stimulants and depressants.

  The resultant increase in energy will help you cope with the stresses and strains of life. The optimum nutrition approach is both a way of breaking energy-consuming patterns that keep depleting us and a method of regenerating energy for breaking the mental habits that initiate a stress response in the first place. So let’s examine what stress-busting optimum nutrition actually means.

  The antistress diet

  Fast-releasing sugars create a state of stress in the body, stimulating the release of Cortisol. So avoid eating white bread, sweets, and breakfast cereals or other foods with added sugar. Slow-releasing carbohydrates, on the other hand, provide an “even keel” of consistent energy. Scientists have investigated exactly what effect different sources of carbohydrates have on blood sugar, energy, and mood. In general, the slow-releasing carbohydrates are fruit, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, and seeds; a more complete list of these foods is given in chapter 10. Contrary to the rules of classic food combining (see this page), recent research has found that eati
ng some protein with carbohydrate provides additional adrenal support by reducing the stimulation of Cortisol. So if you are stressed out, eat your fruit with some nuts, or brown rice with fish. Nuts, seeds, beans, and lentils already contain both protein and carbohydrate and are therefore good antistress foods.

  The energy nutrients

  Energy nutrients include vitamin B6 and zinc, which help insulin work; vitamin B3 and chromium, which are part of the glucose tolerance factor and now available as a complex called chromium polynicotinate; and a whole host of nutrients required to turn glucose within cells into energy. These include vitamins B1, B2, B3, and B5 and coenzyme Q10, vitamin C, iron, copper, and magnesium. vitamin B12 is required to make adrenaline, while B5 (pantothenic acid) is required to make another class of adrenal hormones called glucocorticoids. Muscle and nerve transmission, the end result of turning fuel into energy, requires yet more B5 and large amounts of the semiessential nutrient choline, plus the minerals calcium and magnesium. Choline is also needed to produce stress hormones. Amino acids, the building blocks of protein, are also the building blocks of stress hormones and neurotransmitters. Methionine, an amino acid that is commonly deficient, is required to make adrenal hormones. Insulin is a complex of fifty-one amino acids and zinc. Adrenaline is synthesized from the amino acids phenylalanine or tyrosine.

  The ideal quantity to take in supplement form to provide top-level support for stressed people, and to maximize energy, depends very much on individual circumstances. Optimal daily requirements, however, are likely to be in the ranges shown in the following table.