What Grain Is Doing To Your Brain

Forbes ^ | 11-14-2013 | Gary Drevitch

[Renfield]

It’s tempting to call David Perlmutter’s dietary advice radical. The neurologist and president of the Perlmutter Health Center in Naples, Fla., believes all carbs, including highly touted whole grains, are devastating to our brains. He claims we must make major changes in our eating habits as a society to ward off terrifying increases in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia rates.

And yet Perlmutter argues that his recommendations are not radical at all. In fact, he says, his suggested menu adheres more closely to the way mankind has eaten for most of human history.

What’s deviant, he insists, is our modern diet. Dementia, chronic headaches, depression, epilepsy and other contemporary scourges are not in our genes, he claims. “It’s in the food you eat,” Perlmutter writes in his bestselling new book, Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar – Your Brain’s Silent Killers. “The origin of brain disease is in many cases predominantly dietary.”...

[drbuzzard]

I’d say the sedentary lifestyle coupled with the easy access to food on a whim is what it killing us. It’s basically a matter of our own success.

Now personally, I’m tired of doctors who have pretty much zero research training, and who probably couldn’t set up a valid experiment to save their lives presuming to proffer radical solutions based on facts they pulled out of their nether orifices.

Doctors, in my experience, are only middling bright in the ability to analyze data and manage problem solving. That simply isn’t what their training involves. Doctors are trained to memorize books, and then relate observations to previous diagnoses. While there are some bright doctors out there, those generally have other degrees on top of the MDs which show they are actually capable of scientific research. Being an MD is completely unrelated to the ability to research new cures.

[Prolixus]

To Gary Drevitch: Do you want to live forever?

[agere_contra]

Anyway, as I said before, grain can only be made safe when it has been properly fermented.

+1.

And it applies to so many foods. Cacao beans for chocolate, soy etc

[grania]

I get so confused. Sometimes the advice is that 100% whole grain bread is okay. Sometimes the advice is to eat grasses instead of grains. Sometimes it's to only eat things our ancestors the apes ate. Sometimes it's that one can only eat meat if the animal lived a healthy, drug-free life on the open range.

It's okay. Today's news is that coffee is healthy.

<^..^>

[wyowolf]

I follow this diet religiously!!

[logic101.net]

Often bread was the only thing in the meal. This lasted for most of human history. I am pretty sure that most meals refered to in the bible had no other food item mentioned.

[thesearethetimes...]

BookMark

[9YearLurker]

Those are some apt observations.

[9YearLurker]

Bread in some form is thought to go back 30,000 years, but it probably wasn’t pervasive for some time after that. Quite some time, but not that long evolutionarily.

[dalereed]

Total BS!!!

[9YearLurker]

Indeed, our bread has changed significantly.

[gr8eman]

Chili, Hot wings and Beer!!!

[yldstrk]

how do you eat fat?

what fat would you eat

[yldstrk]

Atkins worked for me

so did Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type which said steak and salad, I can eat that all day

[mazda77]

Read the book. I did and it was enlightening, very enlightening.

At first I wondered being a natural skeptic but hearing a long interview with Boortz while driving to see a customer, I decided to at least get the book and read it to see what was in it. (unlike our politicians)

What I found was a very well researched and annotated book that is not easy to read because of the fact it was written by a doctor. I slogged through it and am changing my diet because of the empirical data that I followed up on and not just take the book on face value.

[Vanders9]

Yes, this is why these half-baked solutions are so dangerous. They confuse people as to what they should or should not be eating, (or doing for that matter). It instills a kind of "Peter and the wolf mentality" into the population. People think the advice on diet changes all the time - because now its carbs that are the problem, before that it was fat, before that it was carbs again. Before that it was saturated fats, before that starches, before that it was processed food...the public get confused by all the contradictory sensationalist advice. Its the same thing with catastrophes. Now its climate change, before that it was global warming, before that it was volcanoes, before that it was holes in the ozone layer, before that it was global cooling..its no wonder people get blase about it all.

These people bring science into disrepute, because, if you recall the story of Peter and the Wolf, eventually the Wolf DOES turn up, and no one believes it!

[mazda77]

Doctor, have you read his book?

[JRandomFreeper]

Food fetishism is a first world phenomenon.

/johnny

[mazda77]

Read the book, many here yelled when Congress did not read the bill to find out what was in it, now put up, and you know the rest.

[Disambiguator]

My wife has done a fair amount of research about food, and her latest discovery is that it’s not so much grains and gluten that is the issue, it’s the yeasts being used today. Since the 80s, the available yeasts have been seriously modified.

We have been making our own bread from a wild culture (sourdough). It is very tasty and doesn’t cause any side effects.