COGNITIVE OR MENTAL SYMPTOMS
■Agitation, combativeness, or unusual behavior
■Anxiety
■Coma
■Depression
■Difficulty concentrating
■Memory problems
■A state of severe confusion or disorientation
The Brain Health Assessment
The following brain health assessment can give you a snapshot of your current brain health. It’s also a good idea to repeat the assessment at regular intervals after you’ve completed the 4-Week Brain Health Challenge. You, like many of my brain challenge participants, will likely be surprised by how much your score will improve after only 4 weeks on the plan. And if you retake the quiz regularly, you’ll probably notice additional improvements over time, as well. Seeing the change in your score will motivate you to stay on the plan. But experiencing the health benefits—to your brain and overall—is the strongest motivator to continue.
So before we get into the specifics of the program, take the quiz below, which will help you determine your risk of brain disease. Once you total your score, read the results on how the 4-Week Brain Health Challenge can help you.
1.Have you ever been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease? If yes, score 4 points.
2.Have you ever been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease? If yes, score 4 points.
3.Have you ever been diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury or other brain disease (i.e., ALS [Lou Gehrig’s disease], multiple sclerosis, etc.)? If yes, score 4 points.
4.Have you ever been diagnosed (by a doctor) with clinical depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or another mental health disorder? If yes, score 4 points.
5.Do you have a history of concussions? If yes, score 3 points; give yourself an additional point if you lost consciousness during the concussion.
6.Have you ever been diagnosed with high blood pressure? If yes, score 3 points.
7.Have you ever been diagnosed with heart disease? If yes, score 3 points.
8.Have you ever been diagnosed with high cholesterol? If yes, score 2 points.
9.Do you take statin drugs? If yes, score 3 points.
10.Have you ever been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes? If yes, score 3 points.
11.Do you have an immediate family member (parent, brother, or sister) who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or dementia? If yes, score 3 points.
12.Do you have an immediate family member (parent, brother, or sister) who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease? If yes, score 3 points.
13.Do you eat fast food more than once a month? (This includes packaged, processed, and commercially prepared foods, use of bottled sauces and condiments, and restaurant visits.) If once a month, score 1 point; if once a week, score 2 points; if 2+ times per week, score 3 points; if daily, score 4 points.
14.How often do you do 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise? (It must raise your heart rate to qualify.) If never, score 4 points; if once a month, score 3 points; if once a week, score 2 points; if 2 times per week, score 1 point; if 3+ times per week, score 0 points.
15.Do you work out for more than 2 hours a day, 7 days a week? If yes, score 3 points.
16.How many alcoholic beverages do you drink in a week? If you drink 1 to 4 alcoholic beverages weekly, score 1 point; if you drink 5 to 10 alcoholic beverages weekly, score 2 points; if you drink 11 to 15 alcoholic beverages weekly, score 3 points; if you drink more than 15 alcoholic beverages weekly, score 4 points. If you don’t drink, score 0 points.
17.How much do you smoke? If you have never smoked, score 0 points; if you smoke less than 1 pack per day, score 3 points; if you smoke more than 1 pack per day, score 4 points; if you quit more than 5 years ago, score 1 point; if you quit less than 5 years ago, score 3 points.
18.How often do you get less than 7 hours of sleep per night? If never, score 0 points; if less than once a month, score 1 point; if less than once a week, score 2 points; if 2 or more times per week, score 3 points; if every night or almost every night, score 4 points.
19.How often do you drink sugary beverages (such as soda or lattes with syrup or whipped cream) or sweetened juices or eat sweetened cereals, other sweetened prepared foods, or sweet desserts? If once a month, score 0 points; if once a week, score 1 point; if 2 or 3 times a week, score 2 points; if every day, score 3 points; if more than once a day, score 4 points.
20.How frequently do you try new things (new foods, new courses, new physical activities, etc.)? If once a month, score 3 points; if once a week, score 2 points; if 2 or 3 times a week, score 1 point; if every day, score 0 points.
21.How often do you learn new, mentally challenging things (i.e., through reading mentally challenging books; watching educational documentaries; participating in workshops or classroom or distance learning courses; or other mentally challenging activities)? If once a month, score 3 points; if once a week, score 2 points; if every day, score 0 points.
22.Do you feel emotionally supported by your partner, family, or friends? If “definitely,” score 0 points; if “most of the time,” score 1 point; if “sometimes,” score 2 points; if “rarely,” score 3 points; if “never,” score 4 points.
23.How positive would other people say you are? Be honest. If extremely, score 0 points; if mostly, score 1 point; if somewhat, score 2 points; if not at all, score 4 points.
YOUR SCORE
0 to 10 points
Excellent work! Your score is the brain health version of Mensa status. You’re making excellent dietary, lifestyle, and learning choices to keep your brain in tip-top condition. Your risk of brain disease, provided you continue making great choices, is low.
11 to 20 points
Your risk of a brain disease may be low, but you need to make improvements to your diet, lifestyle, and learning choices to ensure your long-term brain health. Take the 4-Week Brain Health Challenge to experience improvements and to set the stage for even better long-term brain health.
21 to 30 points
Now is the time to make diet, lifestyle, and learning changes to lower your risk of brain disease. It’s important to reduce low-grade inflammation, give your brain the foods and nutrition it needs, as well as boost your exposure to new ideas and experiences. If you’ve been sedentary, it’s important to start being active. Even just getting up off the couch for a brisk, 30-minute daily walk can give your brain the boost in oxygen that it needs to function properly.
30+ points
Your risk of brain disease is too high, or you’ve already been diagnosed with one. It’s imperative that you give your brain all the foods, supplements, and lifestyle support it needs to function at its peak. Even if you’ve already been diagnosed with a brain disease or a past traumatic brain injury, you can experience profound improvements in your brain health going forward. There’s no time like the present to make the health improvements necessary for your brain health.
NOTE:
Regardless of your score, if you’ve been diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury or a brain disease such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, it is imperative to begin making dietary and lifestyle changes to maximize your brain health and to support your brain with critical nutrients to slow the progression of these diseases.
THE WONDROUS POWER OF YOUR BRAIN
Your brain is truly miraculous. It is constantly changing and regulating billions of different bodily functions at the same time, every second of every day. Your brain orchestrates the complete renewal of your skin every 28 days, your heart every 30 days, and your lungs every 70 days. And these are just a few of your brain’s miraculous functions. It also governs your thoughts, moods, emotions, movements, speech, and more.
The average person’s brain weighs 3 pounds, yet it has more than 100 billion brain cells, known as neurons. Neurons are connected to each other through synapses, which act like telephone lines between brain cells, carrying information back and forth. If you took all of the phones in the world and all of the phone lines and wires, the t
rillions of calls daily would not compare to the complexity of the activity within one human brain. The brain is so remarkable that no computer on the planet compares to it, either.
While you may think of your brain as a product of your genes and mostly unchanging, growing until you reach a certain age and then unaffected by your lifestyle and environment, the reality is that your brain is always in a state of change. In addition to all of the functions your brain orchestrates, it has the ability to “clean house” to eliminate connections between brain cells no longer in use. Imagine if your closet could clean itself out, disposing of any clothes you haven’t worn in a while and automatically refilling itself with new clothes based on your changing preferences and desires. That’s a lot like what your brain can do. Every second of every day your brain assesses the connections between brain cells to determine if they have been used in a while. If they haven’t, it dismantles them to make room for new connections. If they are in use, it strengthens these connections for future use.
Every brain cell has a long, wire-like structure called an axon that sends out hormones to generate the electrical charge that allows neurons to communicate. These hormones are transmitters of information, or neurotransmitters, as they are called. There are more than a dozen types of neurotransmitters, each of which performs different functions depending on what message the brain cell is trying to send out. Some neurons turn on functions in your body, while others stop functions from occurring. You may have heard of some neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. Your brain attempts to keep all of these, and other hormones, balanced to help you feel good and to maintain a state of health. If these hormones become imbalanced, illness or disease can strike, as you’ll learn later in this book.
Balanced neurotransmitters aren’t the only predictor of brain health; inflammation is also a factor. While many doctors and patients alike don’t worry about inflammation of the brain unless it is extremely severe, as in the case of a traumatic brain injury or encephalitis, low-grade, ongoing inflammation can be a real problem for long-term brain health and the prevention of brain disease.
The person who exemplifies the immense potential of the human brain is actually an infant. It may seem surprising that an infant’s brain best demonstrates everything the human brain offers, but it’s true. By about 8 months old, a baby’s brain has about 1,000 trillion connections, half of which will die off by the time the child is only 10 years old, leaving 500 trillion to last throughout the rest of his life.
An infant’s brain develops faster and better during the first few years of life than at any other time. A young child is constantly absorbing information from sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes, as well as through interactions with humans, animals, and other living beings (such as insects, amphibians, and plants). Scientists hypothesize that a baby’s brain forms such an enormous number of synapses to ensure that he will have enough “wiring” to receive input from any environment he is born into, as well as to last him his entire lifetime of experiences.
A rich sensory environment is as critical to an infant’s development as adequate nutrition. And both are essential throughout a person’s lifetime, regardless of his or her age.
Few people recognize the importance of adequate nutrition to the building and maintenance of a healthy brain. Yet your digestive system breaks down every food you eat into nutrients that act as building blocks for every single cell in your body, including all of your brain and nervous system cells. And when the food you eat lacks nutrients, or worse yet, contains harmful sugars, toxic fats, or chemical additives, your brain not only misses the nutrients it requires for health, but it must also deal with the onslaught of harmful ingredients your body was never intended to deal with.
The Facts about ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease)
ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It is a brain disease that causes muscle weakness and impacts physical function. Named “Lou Gehrig’s disease” after the famous baseball player who suffered from the disorder, it is a type of motor neuron disease that causes nerve cells to gradually break down. It is also sometimes called motor neuron disease.
Scientists still aren’t sure what causes the disease, and it appears that only a small number of cases are genetic. However, recent research links exposure to pesticides, such as the commonly used weed killer Roundup, to the disease,2 making toxin exposures an important area of future research.
ALS usually begins with muscle twitching, weakness in an arm or leg, and sometimes slurred speed. Over time, it can affect muscular control. While there isn’t a known cure, diet and lifestyle may help manage the disease and possibly slow its progression.
THE BRAIN DISEASE–INFLAMMATION LINK
Scientists have linked chronic, low-grade inflammation with many serious health problems, including arthritis, asthma, heart disease, and cancer. Many now believe that it is also an underlying factor in brain diseases such as depression and possibly dementia.
While the link between brain diseases and inflammation is still in the early stages of investigation, it warrants serious consideration. That’s because inflammation is increasingly viewed as an indicator of poor health. Because it is such an important disease predictor, more and more doctors are testing for a marker of inflammation known as C-reactive protein as part of their laboratory testing and investigations into potential causes of ill health.
Inflammation is necessary for survival. It’s a clear sign that your immune system has gone into combat mode to fight viruses, bacteria, fungi, or other foreign invaders that may jeopardize your health. When you get a cut or experience an infection, your immune system sends in its frontline defenses in the form of white blood cells and cytokines that can target invaders and send them packing. When that happens, you may experience swelling or feverishness—clear signs of inflammation and an active immune system. While the immune response is necessary for your health and sometimes even for your life, it can sometimes continue after it is no longer needed.
When inflammation lasts for the longer term, or becomes chronic, it can damage your body. Cytokines can stay in your bloodstream and damage tissue. An increasing number of studies show that chronic inflammation in the brain can cause anxiety, fatigue, pain, depression, and other serious health conditions.
A study conducted by Honglei Chen, MD, PhD, and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health found that inflammation plays an important role in the development of Parkinson’s disease.3 Additional research in the journal Neurology found that anti-inflammatory approaches seem to prevent and treat the disease.4 Inflammatory processes also appear during the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
In addition to the obvious problem—chronic inflammation in the brain wreaking havoc—there is another problem: We still lack brain imaging devices sensitive enough to pick up most cases of inflammation. That’s why increasing numbers of health practitioners are testing for C-reactive protein, since it is a clear marker for inflammation in the body and/or brain.
While we wait for the science to catch up, engaging in a diet and lifestyle that quell inflammation is an effective way to address the problem at its source. That’s where Boost Your Brain Power in 60 Seconds comes in. It is based on research-proven foods, strategies, lifestyle changes, and nutritional and botanical medicines that reduce inflammation and prevent or reverse brain disease.
The program also works to reduce stress, which is a well-established trigger of inflammation. Research even links a difficult childhood to higher rates of chronic inflammation, making it important for people who experienced stressful childhoods to get on top of the inflammation that may be behind their brain health issues. In a study of nearly 1,000 people ages 45 to 90 with cardiovascular disease, those who experienced major stressors, such as natural disasters or serious car accidents, had higher levels of inflammation in their bodies.5 Other research links stress early in life to higher rates of inflammatory diseases in adulthood.6
; More than 100 studies show that environmental, nutritional, and lifestyle factors play a significant role in initiating or accelerating brain disease. Fortunately, the program outlined in this book works to address the stress, inflammation, and environmental, nutritional, and lifestyle factors that are linked to brain health and disease. In the next chapter, we’ll further explore the nutritional way to significantly reduce inflammation in your body.
The Facts about Depression
Everyone feels down at some point in life, usually as a reaction to difficult circumstances; however, clinical depression goes beyond that experience. In clinical depression, the person experiences a prolonged sadness that is out of proportion with the apparent cause. The physical and psychological symptoms affect a person’s capacity to function normally in the world.
Depression is often accompanied by sleep disruption, fatigue, anxiety, mood swings, prolonged lapses of concentration, pain, apathy, decreased sex drive, and suicidal thoughts. Because these symptoms can be attributed to other diseases or conditions, it is always important to consult a medical doctor for a diagnosis.
The Facts about Huntington’s Disease
Huntington’s disease (HD) is a serious degenerative brain disorder that affects muscles, memory, and behavior patterns of people suffering from the illness. HD is an inherited brain disorder that causes cells in parts of the brain to prematurely die, specifically in the caudate, the putamen, and, as the disease progresses, the cerebral cortex. As the brain cells die, a person with HD becomes less able to control movements, recall events, make decisions, and control emotions.
Boost Your Brain Power in 60 Seconds Page 2