Want a Better Brain? Eat Less
“About 30 percent less. Recent studies suggest that caloric reduction of about this magnitude will not only prolong life, it will also prolong the life of the mind. That’s intuitively obvious. Mind and body are obviously interconnected. What hurts one hurts both.” Sanford Rose
Dolors & Sense
by Sanford Rose
KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—11/19/2012—About 30 percent less.
Recent studies suggest that caloric reduction of nearly a third will not only prolong life, it will also prolong the life of the mind.
That’s intuitively obvious. Mind and body are obviously interconnected. What hurts one hurts both.
Bingeing hurts the body: excess fat, especially abdominal fat, is inflammatory.
Chronic inflammation promotes heart disease and diabetes.
Heart disease and diabetes interfere with glucose metabolism.
Impaired glucose metabolism kills the cells of the brain, the organ that is about 2 percent of body weight but quaffs about 25 percent of body glucose.
The connections are a bit more subtle and complex than are described here, but they are incontrovertible.
In one study, researchers divided a group of 60 aging, somewhat overweight but nonetheless healthy people into three subgroups.
The first reduced their daily caloric intake by 30 percent, or around 600 calories, for three months.
The second consumed the usual number of calories but ate more unsaturated and less saturated fat.
The third were the control group. They made no changes.
At the end of the three months, Subgroup 1 recorded a significant loss of weight and a concomitant fall in body-mass index. In consequence, insulin resistance dropped and, perhaps most important, a measure of systemic inflammation, C-reactive protein, improved greatly.
Subgroups 2 and 3 recorded no weight loss and no improvement in insulin sensitivity or reduction in inflammation.
Then all three groups took memory tests.
You guessed it. Only Subgroup 1 demonstrated a measurably more retentive memory than had been recorded three months earlier. And the degree of improvement was so great that the likelihood of this happening through chance was about one in a thousand.
Previous postings have emphasized the importance of strenuous exercise to brain health. It may turn out that the best way to help our brains involves exercise no more strenuous than an early exit from the dining room table.
Sanford Rose
Sanford Rose, of New Jersey and Florida, served as Associate Editor of Fortune Magazine from 1968 till 1972; Vice President of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972; Senior Editor of Fortune between 1972 and 1979; and Associate Editor, Financial Editor and Senior Columnist of American Banker newspaper between 1979 and 1991. From 1991 till 2001, Rose worked as a consultant in the banking industry and a professional ghost writer in the field of finance. He has also taught as an adjunct professor of banking at Columbia University and an adjunct instructor of economics at New York University. He states that he left gainful employment in 2001 to concentrate on gain-less investing. (A lifelong photo-phobe, Rose also claims that the head shot accompanying his Weekly Hubris columns is not his own, but belongs, instead, to a skilled woodworker residing in South Carolina.)