Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
How to Use This Book
Part 1: You Are What You Eat
Chapter 1: The Invisible Problem
Genius Food #1: Extra-Virgin Olive Oil
Chapter 2: Fantastic Fats and Ominous Oils
Genius Food #2: Avocados
Chapter 3: Overfed, yet Starving
Genius Food #3: Blueberries
Chapter 4: Winter Is Coming (For Your Brain)
Genius Food #4: Dark Chocolate
Part 2: The Interconnectedness of It All (Your Brain
Responds)
Chapter 5: Healthy Heart, Healthy Brain
Genius Food #5: Eggs
Chapter 6: Fueling Your Brain
Genius Food #6: Grass-Fed Beef
Chapter 7: Go with Your Gut
Genius Food #7: Dark Leafy Greens
Chapter 8: Your Brain’s Chemical Switchboard
Genius Food #8: Broccoli
Part 3: Putting Yourself in the Driver’s Seat
Chapter 9: Sacred Sleep (and the Hormonal Helpers)
Genius Food #9: Wild Salmon
Chapter 10: The Virtues of Stress (or, How to Become a
More Robust Organism)
Genius Food #10: Almonds
Chapter 11: The Genius Plan
Chapter 12: Recipes and Supplements
“Cheesy” Scrambled Eggs
Jamaican Me Smarter
Grass-Fed Picadillo
Pan-Seared Wild Alaskan Salmon with Turmeric,
Ginger, and Tahini-Miso
Banging Liver
Insanely Crispy Gluten-Free Buffalo Chicken Wings
Turmeric-Almond Chicken Fingers
Sautéed Greens
Better Brain Bowl
“Cheesy” Kale Salad
Brain-Boosting Raw Chocolate
Acknowledgments
Resources
Notes
Index
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Before you play two notes learn how to play one note—and
don’t play one note unless you’ve got a reason to play it.
–MARK HOLLIS
If you’d have told me a few years ago that I’d one day write
a book about optimizing the brain, I would have been sure
you had mistaken me for someone else.
After I switched my college major from premed to film
and psychology, the idea of a career in health seemed
unlikely. This was compounded by the fact that soon after I
graduated, I became entrenched in what I considered a
dream job: a journalist and presenter on TV and the Web.
My focus was stories that I felt were underreported and
could make a positive impact on the world. I was living in
Los Angeles—a city I’d idolized as an MTV-watching teen
growing up in New York—and had just ended a five-year
stint hosting and producing content for a socially conscious
TV network called Current. Life was great. And it was all
about to change.
As much as I enjoyed the Hollywood life, I’d often find
myself making trips back east to see my mom and two
younger brothers. In 2010, on one of those trips home, my
brothers and I noticed a subtle change in the way my
mother, Kathy, walked. She was fifty-eight at the time and
had always had a spirited way about her. But suddenly, it
was as though she were wearing a space suit underwater—
each stride and gesture looked like a purposeful, conscious
decision. Though I know better now, back then I couldn’t
even make the connection between the way she moved and
her brain’s health.
She also began offhandedly complaining of mental
“fogginess.” This too was lost on me. No one in my family
had ever had memory problems. In fact, my maternal
grandmother lived to ninety-six and her memory was sharp
until the end. But in my mom’s case, it seemed as if her
overall processing speed had slowed, like a Web browser
with too many open tabs. We started to notice that when we
would ask her to pass the salt at dinner, it would take her a
few extra beats to register. While I chalked what I was
seeing up to “normal aging,” deep down I had the chilling
suspicion that something wasn’t right.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2011 during a family trip to
Miami that those suspicions were confirmed. My mom and
dad had been divorced since I was eighteen, and this was
one of the few times since then that my brothers and I were
together with my parents under the same roof—seeking
respite from the summer heat in my dad’s apartment. One
morning, my mother was standing at the breakfast bar. With
the whole family present, she hesitated, and then announced
that she had been having memory problems and had
recently sought the help of a neurologist.
In an incredulous but playful tone, my father asked her,
“Is that so? Well then, what year is it?”
She stared at us blankly for a moment, and then another.
My brothers and I chuckled and chimed in, breaking the
uneasy silence. “Come on, how could you not know the
year?”
She responded, “I don’t know,” and began to cry.
The memory is seared into my brain. My mom was at
her most vulnerable, courageously trying to communicate
her internal pain, defective but self-aware, frustrated and
scared, and we were completely ignorant. It was the moment
I learned one of life’s hardest lessons: that nothing else
means a thing when a loved one gets sick.
The flurry of medical visits, expert consultations, and
tentative diagnoses that followed culminated at the tail end
of a trip to the Cleveland Clinic. My mom and I had just
walked out of a renowned neurologist’s office and I was
trying to interpret the labels on the pill bottles clutched in
my hand. They looked like hieroglyphics.
Staring at the labels, I silently mouthed out the drug
names to myself in the parking lot of the hospital. Ar-i-cept.
Sin-e-met. What were they for? Pill bottles in one hand,
unlimited data plan in the other, I turned to the digital-age
equivalent of a safety blanket: Google. In 0.42 seconds, the
search engine returned results that would ultimately change
my life.
Information on Aricept for Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease? No one had said anything about
Alzheimer’s disease. I became anxious. Why hadn’t the
neurologist mentioned that? For a moment, the world
around me ceased to exist but for the voice in my head.
Does my mom have Alzheimer’s disease? Isn’t that
something only old people get?
How could she have it, and at this age?
Grandma is ninety-four and she’s fine.
Why is mom acting so calm? Does she understand what
this means? Do I?
How long does she have before . . . whatever comes
next?
What does come next?
The neurologist had mentioned “Parkinson’s Plus.” Plus
what? “Plus” had sounded like a bonus. Economy Plus
means more legroom—usually a good thing. Pert Plus was
shampoo plus conditioner, also a good thing. No. My mom
was prescribed medicines for Parkinson’s disease plus
Alzheimer’s disease. Her “bonus feature” was the symptoms
of a bonus disease.
As I read about the pills I was still holding, repeating
phrases stuck out to me.
“No disease-modifying ability.”
“Limited efficacy.”
“Like a Band-Aid.”
Even the doctor had seemed resigned. (I later learned a
cold joke circulated among med school students about
neurology: “Neurologists don’t treat disease, they admire
it.”)
That night I was sitting alone in our Holiday Inn suite, a
couple of blocks from the hospital. My mom was in the
other room, and I was at my computer, manically reading
anything I could find on both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s
disease, even though my mom’s symptoms did not fit neatly
into either diagnosis. Confused, uninformed, and feeling
powerless, it was then that I experienced something I’d
never felt before. My vision narrowed and darkened, and
fear enveloped my consciousness. Even with my limited
insight at the time I could tell what was happening. Heart
pounding, hungry for air, a feeling of impending doom—I
was having a panic attack. Whether it lasted minutes or
hours I can’t be sure, but even as the physical
manifestations subsided the emotional dissonance remained.
I chewed on that sensation for days afterward. After I
returned to LA and the initial storm cleared, I felt like I was
left standing on a shattered landscape, surveying the path
ahead without a map or compass. My mom began taking the
chemical Band-Aids, but I felt continual unease. Surely the
fact that we had no family history of dementia meant there
had to be something environmental triggering her illness.
What changed in our diets and lifestyles between my
grandmother’s generation and my mother’s? Was my mom
somehow poisoned by the world around her?
As these questions circled my head, I found little room
to think about anything else, including my career. I felt like
Neo from The Matrix, reluctantly conscripted by the white
rabbit to save my mother. But how? There was no Morpheus
to guide me.
I decided the first step was to pack up my West Coast
life and move back to New York to be closer to my mom, so
I did just that, and spent the following year reading
everything I possibly could on both Alzheimer’s and
Parkinson’s disease. Even in those early months, as I’d sit
on her couch after dinner, face buried in research, I can
recall watching my mom pick dishes up off the dining room
table. Dirty plates in hand, she’d begin taking a few steps in
the direction of her bedroom instead of the kitchen. I’d
watch quietly, counting each second that would pass before
she’d catch herself, as the knot that had formed in my
stomach tied itself tighter. Every time, my fortitude in the
search for answers was renewed.
One year turned into two, and two years turned into
three, as my fixation on understanding what was happening
to my mom consumed me. One day, it dawned on me that I
had something that few others have: media credentials. I
began to use my calling card as a journalist to reach out to
leading scientists and clinicians around the globe, each of
whom I’ve found to hold another clue in my scavenger hunt
for truth. To date, I’ve read hundreds (if not thousands) of
discipline-spanning scientific papers, and I’ve interviewed
dozens of leading researchers and many of the most highly
respected clinicians in the world. I’ve also had the
opportunity to visit research labs at some of our most
respected institutions—Harvard, Brown, and Sweden’s
Karolinska Institutet, to name a few.
What external environment allows our bodies and brains
to thrive rather than malfunction? That became the basis of
my investigation. What I’ve found has changed the way I
think of our most delicate organ and defies the fatalistic
view given to me by the vast majority of neurologists and
scientific experts in the field. You will be surprised—
perhaps even shocked—to learn that if you are one of the
millions of people worldwide with a genetic predisposition
to developing Alzheimer’s disease (statistically, you have
one-in-four odds of that being the case), you may respond
even better to the principles proposed in this book. And, by
following them, you will likely have more energy, better
sleep, less brain fog, and a happier mood, today.
Through this journey, I’ve realized that medicine is a
vast field with many silos. When it comes to knowing how
best to care for something as complex as the human body,
let alone the brain, you have to break apart those silos.
Everything is related in unimaginable ways, and connecting
the dots requires a certain level of creative thinking. You
will learn about these many relationships in this book. For
example, I’ll share a method of fat burning so powerful
some researchers have called it biochemical liposuction—
and how it may be your brain’s best weapon against decay.
Or how certain foods and physical exercises actually make
your brain cells work more efficiently.
While I’m dedicated to communicating the intricacies of
nutrition to laypeople, I am also passionate about speaking
directly to doctors, because surprisingly few are adequately
trained in these topics. I’ve been invited to teach (as well as
learn from!) medical students and neurology trainees at
esteemed academic institutions such as Weill Cornell
Medicine, and I have had the opportunity to lecture at the
New York Academy of Sciences alongside many of the
researchers cited in this book. I’ve helped create tools that
are being used to teach physicians and other health-care
providers around the world about the clinical practice of
Alzheimer’s prevention, and I’ve coauthored a chapter on
the same topic in a textbook geared to neuropsychologists.
I’ve even assisted with research at the Alzheimer’s
Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-
Presbyterian.
What follows is a result of this gargantuan and unending
effort to understand not only what happened to my mother,
but how to prevent it from happening to myself and others.
My hope is that by reading about how to make your brain
work better in the here and now, you will prevent your own
decline and push your cognitive health span to its natural
limits.
How to Use This Book
This book is a guide to attaining optimal brain function with
the pleasant side effect of minimizing dementia risk—all
according to the latest science.
Maybe you’re looking to hit the reset button on your
mental agility, to clear the cache, so to speak. Perhaps
you’re hoping to increase productivity and gain a leg up on
your competition. Maybe you’re one of the millions of
people around the globe battling brain fog. Or depression.
Or an inability to cope with stress. Perhaps you have a loved
one suffering from dementia or cognitive decline and are
fearful for them, or of succumbing to the same fate. No
matter what led you to pick up Genius Foods, you’re in the
right place.
This book is an attempt to uncover the facts and propose
new unifying principles to counter our collective modern
malaise. You’ll learn about the foods that have become
casualties of the modern world—raw materials to build your
best brain yet, replaced by the biological equivalent of
cheap particleboard. Every chapter delves into the precise
elements of optimal brain function—from your precious cell
membranes, to your vascular system, to the health of your
gut—all through the lens of what matters most: your brain.
Each chapter is followed by a “Genius Food,” containing
many of the beneficial elements discussed in the
surrounding text. These foods will serve as your weapons
against cognitive mediocrity and decay—eat them, and eat
them often. Later in the book, I’ll detail the optimal Genius
Lifestyle, culminating in the Genius Plan.
I’ve written this three-part book to be read cover to
cover, but feel free to treat it as a reference and skip from
chapter to chapter. And don’t be afraid to take notes in the
margins or highlight key points (this is often how I read!).
Throughout, you’ll also find insights and “Doctor’s
Notes” highlighting my friend and colleague Dr. Paul
Grewal’s clinical and personal experience with many of the
topics we’ll cover. Dr. Paul has had his own challenges,
having gone through medical school with what is now
familiar to many in the Western world: obesity. Desperate to
find a solution to his weight challenges, he ventured out to
learn everything he could about nutrition and exercise—
topics that are unfortunately all but ignored by med school
curricula. The truths he discovered resulted in his shedding
a dramatic one hundred pounds in less than a year, for good
—and he’ll be sharing these lessons on exercise and
nutrition in the pages that follow.
Science is always unfinished business; it’s a method of
finding things out, not an infallible measure of truth.
Throughout this book, we’ll use our understanding of the
best available evidence, while taking into account that not
everything can be measured by a science experiment.
Sometimes observation and clinical practice are the best
evidence we have, and the ultimate determinant of health is
h o w you respond to a given change. We take an
evolutionary approach: we hold the position that the less
time a food product or medicine or supplement has been
around, the higher the burden of proof for it to be included
in what we consider a healthful diet and lifestyle. We call
this “Guilty until Proven Innocent” (see the section on
polyunsaturated seed oils in chapter 2 as an example).
Personally, I started this journey from a blank slate,
following the evidence wherever it took me. I’ve used my
lack of preconceived notions to my advantage, to keep an
objective distance from the subject and ensure that I’ve
never missed the forest for the trees. Thus, you will see a
linking of disciplines that may not be connected in other
books of this genre, e.g., metabolism and heart health, heart
health and brain health, brain health and how you actually
feel. We believe that bridging these divides holds the keys to
the cognitive kingdom.
Finally, we know that there are genetic differences
between individuals, as well as differences in our health and
fitness levels, that will determine things like carbohydrate
tolerance and response to exercise. We’ve found the broadly
applicable common denominators that will benefit everyone
and have included sidebars with guidance on how to
customize our recommendations to your own biology.
My hope is that when you finish reading Genius Foods,
you’ll understand your brain in a new way, as something
able to be “tuned up” like a bicycle. You’ll see food anew—
as software, able to bring your brain back online and run
your endlessly capable mind. You’ll learn where to find the
nutrients that can actually help you to remember things
better and give you a greater sense of energy. You’ll see
that actually slowing the aging process (including cognitive
aging) is just as much about the foods you omit from your
diet as those you choose to consume, as well as when and
how you consume them. I’ll also share with you the food
that may shave more than a decade off of the biological age
of your brain.
I have to be honest—I’m so excited for you to begin this
journey with me. Not only will you begin feeling your best
within two weeks, you’ll be fulfilling my hidden agenda—
and perhaps my one true goal for you: to make use of the
latest and best available evidence so that you might avoid
what my mom and I have experienced. We deserve better
brains—and the secret lies in our food.
The Genius Foods.
Part 1
You Are What You Eat
Chapter 1
The Invisible Problem
Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain
only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as
our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular,
we think, see, hear and distinguish the ugly from the
beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the
unpleasant. It is the same thing which makes us mad or
delirious, inspires us with fear, brings sleeplessness and
aimless anxieties. . . . In these ways I hold that the brain is
the most powerful organ in the human body.
–HIPPOCRATES
Ready for the good news?
Nestled within your skull, mere inches from your eyes,
are eighty-six billion of the most efficient transistors in the
known universe. This neural network is you, running the
operating system we know as life, and no computer yet
conceived comes close to its awesome capabilities. Forged
over millions and millions of years of life on Earth, your
brain is capable of storing nearly eight thousand iPhones’
worth of information. Everything you are, do, love, feel,
care for, long for, and aspire to is enabled by an incredibly
complex, invisible symphony of neurological processes.
Elegant, seamless, and blisteringly fast: when scientists tried
to simulate just one second of a human brain’s abilities, it
took supercomputers forty minutes to do so.
Now for the bad news: the modern world is like The
Hunger Games, and your brain is an unwitting combatant,
hunted mercilessly and relentlessly from all sides. The way
we live today is undermining our incredible birthright,
fighting our optimal cognitive performance, and putting us
at risk for some seriously nasty afflictions.
Our industrially ravaged diets supply cheap and plentiful
calories with poor nutrient content and toxic additives. Our
careers shoehorn us into doing the same tasks over and over
again, while our brains thrive with change and stimulation.
We are saddled with stress, a lack of connection to nature,
unnatural sleep patterns, and overexposure to news and
tragedy, and our social networks have been replaced by The
Social Network—all of which lead ultimately to premature
aging and decay. We’ve created a world so far removed
from the one in which our brains evolved that they are now
struggling to survive.
These modern constructs drive us to compound the
damage with our day-to-day actions. We convince ourselves
that six hours in bed means we’ve gotten a full night’s sleep.
We consume junk food and energy drinks to stay awake,
medicate to fall asleep, and come the weekend go overboard
with escapism, all in a feeble attempt to grasp a momentary
reprieve from our daily struggle. This causes a short circuit
in our inhibitory control system—our brain’s inner voice of
reason—turning us into lab rats frantically searching for our
next dopamine hit. The cycle perpetuates itself, over time
reinforcing habits and driving changes that not only make
us feel crappy, but can ultimately lead to cognitive decline.
Whether or not we are conscious of it, we are caught in
the crossfire between warring factions. Food companies,
operating under the “invisible hand” of the market, are
driven by shareholders to deliver ever-increasing profits lest
they risk irrelevance. As such, they market foods to us
explicitly designed to create insatiable addiction. On the
opposing front, our underfunded health-care system and
scientific research apparatus are stuck playing catch-up,
doling out advice and policy that however well intentioned
is subject to innumerable biases—from innocuous errors of
thought to outright corruption via industry-funded studies
and scientific careers dependent on private-interest funding.
It’s no wonder that even well-educated people are
confused when it comes to nutrition. One day we’re told to
avoid butter, the next that we may as well drink it. On a
Monday we hear that physical activity is the best way to lose
weight, only to learn by Friday that its impact on our
waistline is marginal compared to diet. We are told over and
over again that whole grains are the key to a healthy heart,
but is heart disease really caused by a deficiency of morning
oatmeal? Blogs and traditional news media alike attempt to
cover new science, but their coverage (and sensational
headlines) often seems more intent on driving hits to their
websites than informing the public.
Our physicians, nutritionists, and even the government
all have their say, and yet they are consciously and
subconsciously influenced by powers beyond the naked
eye. How can you possibly know who and what to trust
when so much is at stake?
My Investigation
In the early months following my mother’s diagnosis, I did
what any good son would do: I accompanied her to doctors’
appointments, journal full of questions in hand, desperate to
attain even a sliver of clarity to ease our worrying minds.
When we couldn’t find answers in one city, we flew to the
next. From New York City to Cleveland to Baltimore.
Though we were fortunate enough to visit some of the
highest-ranking neurology departments in the United States,
we were met every time with what I’ve come to call
“diagnose and adios”: after a battery of physical and
cognitive tests we were sent on our way, often with a
prescription for some new biochemical Band-Aid and little
else. After each appointment, I became more and more
obsessed with finding a better approach. I lost sleep to
countless late-night hours of research, wanting to learn
everything I possibly could about the mechanisms
underlying the nebulous illness that was robbing my mom
of her brainpower.
Because she was seemingly in her prime when her
symptoms first struck, I wasn’t able to blame old age. A
youthful, fashionable, and charismatic woman in her fifties,
my mom was not—and still is not—the picture of a person
succumbing to the ravages of aging. We had no prior family
history of any kind of neurodegenerative disease, so it
seemed her genes could not be solely responsible. There
had to be some external trigger, and my hunch was that it
had something to do with her diet.
Following that hunch led me to spend the better part of
the past decade exploring the role that food (and lifestyle
factors like exercise, sleep, and stress) play in brain
function. I discovered that a few vanguard clinicians have
focused on the connection between brain health and
metabolism—how the body creates energy from essential
ingredients like food and oxygen. Even though my mom
had never been diabetic, I dove into the research on type 2
diabetes and hormones like insulin and leptin, the littleknown signal that controls the body’s metabolic master
switch. I became interested in the latest research on diet and
cardiovascular health, which I hoped would speak to the
maintenance of the network of tiny blood vessels that
supply oxygen and other nutrients to the brain. I learned
how the ancient bacteria that populate our intestines serve as
silent guardians to our brains, and how our modern diets are
literally starving them to death.
As I uncovered more and more about how food plays
into our risk for diseases like Alzheimer’s, I couldn’t help
but integrate each new finding into my own life. Almost
immediately, I noticed that my energy levels began to
increase, and they felt more consistent throughout the day.
My thoughts seemed to flow more effortlessly, and I found
myself in a better mood more often. I also noticed that I was
more easily able to direct my focus and attention and tune
out distractions. And, though it wasn’t my initial goal, I
even managed to lose stubborn fat and get in the best shape
of my life—a welcome bonus! Even though my research
was initially motivated by my mom, I became hooked on
my new brain-healthy diet.
I had inadvertently stumbled upon a hidden insight: that
the same foods that will help shield our brains against
dementia and aging will also make them work better in the
here and now.
1 By investing in our future selves, we can
improve our lives today.
Reclaim Your Cognitive Birthright
For as long as modern medicine had existed, doctors
believed that the anatomy of the brain was fixed at maturity.
The potential to change—whether for a person born with a
learning disability, a victim of brain injury, a dementia
sufferer, or simply someone looking to improve how their
brain worked—was considered an impossibility. Your
cognitive life, according to science, would play out like this:
your brain, the organ responsible for consciousness, would
undergo a fierce period of growth and organization up to
age twenty-five—the peak state of your mental hardware—
only to begin a long, gradual decline until the end of life.
This was, of course, assuming that you didn’t do anything to
accelerate that process along the way (hello, college).
Then, in the mid-nineties, a discovery was made that
forever changed the way scientists and doctors viewed the
brain: it was found that new brain cells could be generated
throughout the life of the adult human. This was certainly
welcome news to a species heir to the flagship product of
Darwinian evolution: the human brain. Up until that point,
the creation of new brain cells—called neurogenesis—was
thought to occur only during development.