I just spent last weekend at a seminar on brain aging and brain development in the young. These two subjects were put together because the undeveloped brain of an infant or young child has a lot of similarities to the degenerated brain function as one ages and goes into dementia. We begin life as a cluster of primitive reflexes driven by the reptilian survival centers in our brainstem. As we grow we are supposed to develop gating mechanisms to inhibit these primitive reflexes and create more socially acceptable ways of getting our needs met.
In children with brain disorders, such as autism, some of these gating mechanisms fail to develop. With brain degeneration due to aging, some of these mechanisms we developed break down and the person acts out of their primitive reflexes much like a very young child might. Basic gaiting is what gives us the ability to suppress anger and violence, self soothe, regulate emotional upset, focus, and reflect.
One of the basic messages of the seminar is that once the nerves that give us these gaiting skills die, they are gone forever. They are never replaced. Functional cells around them will try to grow around the dead cell to create new connections, but to be able to do this the brain needs lots of specialized nutrition – basically DHA and EPA from fish oil along with good blood flow. But before these new connections can be made, the dead cells and other junk, like the plaques and tau proteins in Alzheimer’s, have to be cleaned out. This junk physically gets in the way of neuron branches trying to reach out and make new connections.
In a natural environment we have seasonal changes in our food supply that promote this cleaning out of garbage in the body and brain. Seasonally, food is in short supply and we naturally have to go periods without food and live on the stored fat we carry on our body. Everyone normally has two or three months of energy stored on their body if they are healthy. That would be the normal 18% body fat men carry and 22-24% body fat women carry as normal healthy weight. After not eating for a couple months, those levels might drop to 8-10%. Any lower than that and you are not able to manufacture the necessary hormones your body needs.
The seminar really impressed upon me how totally important it is to keep our brains as healthy as possible. Longevity without brain health would be a miserable prison – not only for us, but for those that love us as well. Anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 brain cells die normally every day. Forming new connections is the only thing that keeps us functional as we age. But our modern lifestyle sabotages our ability to do this because we never go hungry long enough to stimulate the brain cleanup processes. We are chronically overfed in this culture.
“Humans live on one-quarter of what they eat; on the other three-quarters lives their doctor.” – Egyptian pyramid inscription
When I say hungry, I am not talking about “gee I haven’t had anything to eat in hours and I am really starving” type of hunger. I am talking about all the stored sugar in your muscles and liver being used up and your body switching over to burning stored fats for energy. Additionally your intake of certain proteins has to be down to almost zero before the body will trip into cleaning out the trash mode. The first half of this requirement can be achieved in about two days by simply avoiding all carbs and sugars. Our body does not store proteins; so achieving the second step only takes about a day of avoiding all proteins. That leaves fats and fibers, which don’t affect the clean-out process as much. Simply lowering calories from fats and fibers to below 600 allows the body to start sweeping away garbage blocking the brain’s formation of new neuron connections.
I have several patients right now that need to do this to slow down their memory loss. Toward that end I recommend the one week Veggie Brain Cleaning. Start with one cleaning and see how you do. Ask your loved ones whether they notice any differences in your memory. They often notice things we miss.
Begin your Brain Clean-out by eliminating all sugars, starches, breads, cereals, root vegetables, juices, artificial sweeteners, fruit, grains, anything with carbohydrates in it. The goal is to keep your carbohydrate consumption below 20 grams per day. Zero is not achievable if you eat even lettuce, as every vegetable has some amount of carbohydrate in it. Eat as many non-starchy vegetables as you like as well as meats, fish, tree nuts, eggs, and solid fats like butter as well as olive oil and avocado oil. Do not eat any vegetable or seed oils and never eat any trans fats (mostly from packaged foods). After two days your body should switch into fat burning. Often you will feel tired for a few hours while your body hits empty on its sugar stores and flips over into burning fats. Once you have switched over, we then want to trigger the cleanup process by eliminating proteins and calories over 600 per day. Do this for five days then return to your normal eating.
During those five days you will be eating non-starchy vegetables like the cabbage family – broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, bok choy, as well as leafy greens and salad greens of all sorts. Any food in the radish family is allowable as is celery, olives, avocados, okra, mushrooms, asparagus, and small amounts of onion, garlic, raw carrot, or beet. As a special bonus, zero carb noodles made from konjac root or seaweed alginates can also be used.
Stay away from the night shade vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and potato, as well as the gourd/squash family like zucchini, cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, and the like. Also avoid all legumes including beans, peanuts, lentils, peas, and soy foods. These three plant families contain a lot of plant poisons that inflame our bodies.
During the five days you can also use small amounts of coconut oil, avocado oil, olive oil, and Perilla oil, as well as bone broth. Any non-seed spice can be used as well as fish sauce, vinegars, stevia, lo han, sea salt and nutritional yeast.
For us this looks like a big vegetable stew with bone broth and konjac noodles and big leafy green salads with oil and vinegar dressings. Since what you are eating is basically all low calorie fiber with a little oil added, you can eat all you want. No sneaking in seeds, nuts, or dried fruit into the salads, and no protein foods for the five days. The lack of protein is what stimulates your body to scavenge through your body looking for protein material it needs. This is the clean-out process – scavenging for unused proteins.
After five days of salads and stews you can transition right back to proteins, nuts, and complex carbs like sweet potatoes. I would still stay away from seed oils and sugar as long as possible as they generally mess you up every time you eat them. If you have inflammation like pain in your joints, back, headaches, and so on you might benefit from staying off nightshade vegetables permanently as well as wheat, rye, barley, and rice They all contain poisons that trick your immune system into attacking the cartilage in your joints.
With five days of cleaning out your brain, you will be able to form thousands of new brain nerve connections. You may notice a real difference just from this little intervention. If you have significant impairments with your memory, you may want to do a week of clean-out every month or two. Since you can eat as much as you want, spending five days eating just veggies is very doable. I always feel much better after I do one of these clean-outs.