The Global Brain Health Crisis and Why 2026 Matters
Down here at Fforest Barn Mountain Retreat we are awaiting the arrival of Buddy, our new alpaca, joining Tommy Gun, Food for the Brain’s lucky mascot, along with Vincent, Oran and Winston “the Wolf” Moondance, born on a full moon. This year we are expanding and consolidating our beyond organic food growing, applying all the principles I have learned about health to plants. If you would like to understand these principles, watch the lecture I gave for the BioNutrient Food Association, entitled “As Below So Above”, which explains the five fundamental principles of health of and the basis of my new book The Five Health Essentials.
It was great having the whole Food for the Brain team here on the farm to brainstorm how to make the world a better place. Check out this film for a glimpse.
The apocalypse allusion is deliberate. The cost of dementia, most of which is Alzheimer’s, is untenable. China expects soon to face a trillion dollar annual bill if nothing radical changes to prevent this cerebral tsunami. Brain disorders already cost more than cancer and heart disease combined. Brain health and nutrition must be top of the healthcare agenda if we are to avoid costs that will destabilise economies and families worldwide.
The Design Problem in Modern Healthcare
As I see it, two fundamental problems need solving: corruption and design.
By design I mean having a workable model for healthcare, economics and ecology that functions effectively at scale. In other words, a way of living that supports human health, not undermines it.
I am excited about what we are doing at Food for the Brain because it provides a realistic model for prevention at scale. It is a new paradigm based on systems-based science, not reductionism, and it goes straight to people, to Citizen Scientists, without relying on the corrupted middle layer of healthcare bureaucracy. Watch my six-minute systems-based film for a deeper explanation.
Alpacalypse and the Coming Crisis in Preventive Healthcare
What we are doing for Alzheimer’s prevention can be applied to all major 21st-century disease epidemics, from cancer to diabetes. This spring I will be in Algeria, where the Health Minister is considering integrating this approach into national healthcare. I then head to China to present at a major Alzheimer’s prevention conference. Next week I am speaking to influential CEOs in the US who have the power to scale this globally.
Knowing what works is one thing. Doing it is another. Corruption for profit, in other words greed, is the major drag factor blocking this inevitable paradigm shift. It sickens me that prevention of such a devastating condition, one that robs people of their memories until they die not knowing their own children, is actively blocked to preserve profit from hypothetical, clinically ineffective medication.
The layers of corruption within medical science, academic journals, PR systems and the networks that keep authority figures aligned run deep. The only solution is to keep telling the truth and exposing the lies. Shortly before Linus Pauling died, I filmed him discussing his brilliant lipoprotein(a) hypothesis in heart disease. He advised me to “follow the logic” to find the truth and not to worry about randomised controlled trials; they come later.
The selective use of meta-analyses, which combine chosen RCTs, has become a mechanism to generate pharma gold, not clearer science. A classic example is The Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention report in 2023, which purposely ignored homocysteine-lowering B vitamins and omega-3 (Read more about that here). In combination, these are the single most evidenced, substantial and easily implemented means to cut Alzheimer’s risk by at least a third. That omission is corruption: following the money, not the logic.
Citizen Science as a Scalable Solution to Dementia Prevention
This is why supporting Food for the Brain matters. Becoming a Friend and encouraging those you know to take the Cognitive Function Test strengthens the COGNITION Biobank, which enables true prevention research at scale. I predict that by the end of 2026, this will be the largest dementia prevention research database in the world. My colleagues in China want to test 18 million people over the age of 60.
If you are looking for a New Year’s resolution, I suggest becoming a Citizen Scientist in heart, mind and action. How?
Take the Cognitive Function Test here and tell everyone you know to do it!
Become a Friend – Join over 2,000 members to access monthly coaching and webinars and support this important movement.
Despite everything mentioned, there is so much possibility and hope. And it doesn’t need to be overwhelming, avoid sugar as much as possible. Invest in high-quality food, because it becomes you. Take your supplements every day. Walk at least 5,000 steps a day, ideally 7,000. The most important aspect is to take regular positive actions in your own health journey.
A New Year Call to Action for Citizen Scientists
2026 offers a turning point. Prevention is entirely achievable if people are given truthful education, accessible tools, and a model of change rooted in systems thinking rather than narrow, profit-driven science.
You can make powerful choices that protect your future and the generations to come.
Wishing you a Happy Christmas and a Healthy New Year.
Founder of the Food for the Brain Foundation and the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board
Food for the Brain is a not for profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index. This allows them to advise you on how to dementia proof your diet and lifestyle.
By completing the Cognitive Function Test you are joining our grassroots research initiative to find out what really works for preventing cognitive decline. We share our ongoing research results with you to help you make brain-friendly choices. Please support our research by becoming a Friend of Food for the Brain.
From Awareness to Action: A Year of Progress in Dementia Prevention
A Letter from Emma – Our CEO
This has been a landmark year for Food for the Brain, a year in which our work moved from ambition to acceleration. I am reminded of this shift every time I hear from individuals and families whose lives are quietly changed by prevention. Earlier this year, Nisha told us she had been struggling with her memory and felt genuinely worried about what it might mean for her future. She took the DRIfT blood test and discovered her omega-3 levels were extremely low, even though her vitamin D and HbA1c were in good shape.
She began targeted nutritional changes and, within a few months, noticed her memory improving. The results gave her confidence and direction. Instead of fearing where things were heading, she felt she had a practical route to protect her brain health. For Nisha and her children, that shift was life-changing. As she put it: “What you’ve done with Food for the Brain is on another level.”
Stories like Nisha’s remind us that prevention is powerful. With the right knowledge at the right time, people can change their cognitive trajectory long before disease ever takes hold.
Impact You Can See and Measure
This has been our most expansive year yet. We reached new ground and new communities at a scale we have never seen before.
470,000 people have now taken the Cognitive Function Test, turning a simple twenty-minute assessment into a global source of agency and early action.
134 new countries took part this year, extending our reach into communities we could never have reached on our own.
We translated the Cognitive Function Test into 7 more languages, ensuring prevention becomes accessible, not just aspirational.
Most importantly, 200,000 individuals have now taken direct action to protect their brain health.
Education powers this progress. Over the last twelve months, we delivered more than 5.7 million moments of evidence-based brain health education, helping people understand how to protect and improve their cognitive future. These small moments accumulate into meaningful change.
Strengthening the Organisation for Scale
When I stepped into the CEO role a year ago, my priority was to build the operational backbone needed for the scale we knew was coming. This work is less visible from the outside, but it is the reason we were able to secure Innovate UKsupport, progress major scientific partnerships and prepare for international expansion. Step by step, we are becoming the sustainable, resilient and science-driven organisation this field needs.
Advancing Our Scientific Position
The appointment of Dr Tommy Wood, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Washington, as our Head of Research has been pivotal. Under his leadership, our scientific direction has sharpened into a clear and ambitious programme. Over the past year, we have advanced from holding one of the richest prevention datasets in the world to building a strategic roadmap that strengthens and validates it. Our research team is now refining the Dementia Risk Index with greater precision and clarifying the role of nutritional biomarkers in tracking and modifying future dementia risk.
This work reinforces what sets us apart. We are the organisation connecting cognition, lifestyle patterns, biomarkers and long-term outcomes at population scale, with prevention at the centre. That distinction is now recognised across academic and clinical communities.
Growing Recognition and Influence
This year brought a marked shift in how others see Food for the Brain. Universities, healthcare providers, digital health innovators and international research groups actively sought partnerships. We were invited to contribute, teach and shape the public conversation on dementia prevention in ways that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. The Innovate UK award marked an important milestone, reflecting the relevance of our work to UK innovation and health system priorities
Looking Ahead – My Vision
We are moving out of the era of small charity innovation and into the era of national leadership. And we are only just getting started.
The year ahead will see us drive toward one million Cognitive Function Tests, expandDRIfTtesting, host a global Alzheimer’s Prevention Conference with top researchers, reach more families and children through Smart Kids, increase accessibility for vulnerable communities and progress the work needed for healthcare integration. This is how we bring prevention from the margins of the healthcare system into the mainstream.
My vision is clear.
Food for the Brain will lead a global movement that proves dementia is not inevitable and will empower millions to protect their brains for life.
Philanthropic support plays a vital role in accelerating our impact. If you are in a position to support this next phase of growth through partnership, advocacy or donation, I would be delighted to connect.
With Heartfelt Thanks
To our trustees, scientific advisors, academic partners, FRIENDS, generous donors, volunteers, phenomenally brilliant team members, and the growing community of Citizen Scientists who trust us with their cognitive future – thank you! Your belief fuels our progress, and your partnership directly shapes what we can achieve.
And finally, a personal thank you to Patrick Holford, our founder, whose vision created the foundation on which we now stand and who is now involved in taking our message globally. It is a privilege to lead Food for the Brain into this next chapter, building on the legacy Patrick has created and expanding it into this new era of scientific and global impact.
Together, we are proving what is possible. And it is together that we are protecting brain health and transforming the future for families and society.
Best wishes,
Emma George CEO, Food for the Brain Foundation
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Want to join us?
We couldn’t do without our FRIENDS or without those who contribute to our Citizen Science. Here are three ways you can be part of the movement:
Turn insight into action: The DRIfT 5-in-1 test shows which nutritional and metabolic factors matter most for your brain. No guesswork. No wasted effort.
Help scale prevention:Become a FRIENDand support independent research, education and global action on dementia prevention.
Food for the Brain is a not for profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index. This allows them to advise you on how to dementia proof your diet and lifestyle.
By completing the Cognitive Function Test you are joining our grassroots research initiative to find out what really works for preventing cognitive decline. We share our ongoing research results with you to help you make brain-friendly choices. Please support our research by becoming a Friend of Food for the Brain.
Every three seconds, someone in the world develops dementia and the rate is increasing.
Billions of dollars have been spent on the search for a drug that can block the damaging build-up of plaque in the brain that’s thought to be central to the disease. But the results are not impressive and the side effects include bleeding into the brain.
Now, that gloomy picture is being transformed in a remarkable and surprising way. Rather than pinning our hopes on another new, powerful and expensive drug, mounting evidence suggests that such seemingly old-fashioned approaches as changes in diet, lifestyle, and environment, could dramatically reduce the number of Alzheimer’s cases.
An international Alzheimer’s Prevention Expert Teamhas calculated that over 80 per cent of cases could be prevented in this way. A study in Holland last year found that good levels of vitamin D, omega-3 (found in oily fish), and B vitamins reduced the risk of dementia to less than a quarter of the average(1). Other beneficial changes include regular exercise, staying mentally active, and reducing sugar intake. Reducing sugar intake is especially effective, as people with diabetes have twice the risk of cognitive decline.
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The next big challenge is to discover which combination of changes has the most impact. This is what our research is focused on.
That is why we are hosting the Global Alzheimer’s Prevention Day next week and continuing with our research project to discover the hardest hitting combinations of prevention steps. We have already tested over 200,000 participants in the UK.
We are now inviting people around the world to complete a free, online diet and lifestyle questionnaire and a cognitive function test.
The project, led by Oxford University–trained neuroscientist Dr. Tommy Wood, Associate Professor at the University of Washington, aims to test over 20 million people worldwide. This includes one million participants each from the UK, Germany, and Poland; a similar number from the US, Canada, Brazil, and Japan; and 10 million from China, which has the world’s highest prevalence of dementia.
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Dr. Tommy Wood is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at the University of Washington in Seattle.
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In China, the project is supported by the China National Health Association and former Minister of Health, Gao Qiang. “We must popularise prevention,” he says. “With 300 million people over 60, this has to be our focus. Food for the Brain’s initiative is the way forward. It’s something everyone can do, right now, for themselves.” China’s leading prevention expert, Professor Jin-Tai Yu from Fudan University in Shanghai, adds: “It may be possible to prevent up to 80% of dementia cases if all known risk factors are targeted.” He highlights the particular importance of B vitamins, which reduce levels of a toxic amino acid found in the brain called homocysteine. High homocysteine levels can damage both brain cells and blood vessels. (Test your homocysteine levels at home here)
His research, along with findings from Oxford University’s leading prevention expert, Professor David Smith – who has been analysing data from the – has already shown that up to 73% of dementia cases may be preventable, even without factoring in the benefits of B vitamins and omega-3.
“Our research at Oxford found almost nine times less shrinkage in the Alzheimer’s associated areas of the brain in those taking B vitamin supplements, who had raised homocysteine (3), which is common among over 60+ year olds, and in early signs of dementia.” says Professor Smith.
Wu YingPing, President of the China National Health Association, believes it is the combination of diet, nutritional supplementation, and lifestyle that can significantly influence dementia prevention in the ‘silver-haired’ community. “It is education, rather than medication, that we need, and Food for the Brain’s global campaign is something we fully support to help achieve this.”
In the UK, Japan, and Brazil, a task force of over 10,000 doctors is being trained to enrol their patients in the ‘citizen science’ charitable project, which is funded by individuals rather than vested-interest companies.
In the UK, a group of GPs, part of the Public Health Collaboration, have joined the task force to help drive the project to hundreds of thousands of patients across the UK. Former GP and Chair of the Public Health Collaboration, Dr David Jehring, says: “personalised digital health education such as this is the way forward. No drug treatment has yet produced a clinically meaningful effect, without awful adverse effects. We have to face the reality that dementia can only be prevented by tackling that ‘perfect storm’ of 21st-century diet and lifestyle that creates cognitive decline in the first place. It is not likely to be solvable by medication.”
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In the US, Dr Mark Hyman, who is part of our group of prevention experts, is supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly appointed Secretary of Health, in the campaign to ‘Make America Healthy Again’, with prevention at its core.
“Our healthcare system is failing because it treats symptoms rather than addressing the root causes of disease. I fully support Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s commitment to investigating the underlying drivers of chronic illness and ensuring that prevention – not just treatment – is at the core of our national health strategy. The science is clear: food is the most powerful medicine we have to prevent, reverse, and even treat conditions like dementia, autoimmune diseases, and metabolic disorders. If we truly want to make America healthy again, we must shift our focus from managing disease to creating health,” says Dr Hyman
As part of our ‘Going Global’ campaign, we’ve created a shorter, 3-minute version of our Cognitive Function Test – the Alzheimer’s Prevention Check!
Professor Peter Garrard, Director of the Dementia Research Group at St George’s, University of London, says: “It is vital that functional biomarkers such as homocysteine and omega-3 are measured in this research because these can be changed with nutritional interventions and are associated with reducing risk.”
“The purpose of this global campaign is to collect diet, lifestyle, biomarker, and cognitive function data on an unprecedented scale. With this data, we hope to discover which lifestyle changes have the maximum likelihood of preventing cognitive decline early enough to minimise an individual’s dementia risk in the future.” says Dr Tommy Wood, who is leading the research.
Anyone can take part and become a ‘citizen scientist’ by completing our free online Alzheimer’s Prevention Check, which then provides personalised advice on changes you can make to help reduce your future risk.
All data collected is anonymised for research purposes and will be made available to prevention researchers around the world.
Our aim at Food for the Brain is to discover the simplest changes that have the greatest impact on cognitive function in preventing this devastating disease, and then share that information with the public and the public health experts who advise governments around the world.
Fewer than one in a hundred cases of Alzheimer’s is caused by genetics. This means that, potentially, 99% of cases could be preventable.
Order the new book: Alzheimer’s: Prevention is the Cure – A 240-page guide by Patrick Holford, available internationally from 1st May at foodforthebrain.org/apic, and also on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.
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Food for the Brain is a not-for-profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index to be able to advise you on how to dementia-proof your diet and lifestyle.
By completing the Cognitive Function Test you are joining our grassroots research initiative to find out what really works for preventing cognitive decline. We share our ongoing research results with you to help you make brain-friendly choices. Please support our research by becoming a Friend of Food for the Brain.
References:
1 Roigé-Castellví J, Murphy M, Fernández-Ballart J, Canals J. Moderately elevated preconception fasting plasma total homocysteine is a risk factor for psychological problems in childhood. Public Health Nutr. 2019 Jun;22(9):1615-1623. doi: 10.1017/S1368980018003610. Epub 2019 Jan 14. PMID: 30636652; PMCID: PMC10261079. 2 Kara İS, Peker NA, Dolğun İ, Mertoğlu C. Vitamin B12 Level in Children. J Curr Pediatr. 2023 Aug;21(2):127-134. doi:10.4274/jcp.2023.75688. 3 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4440679/
At the end of 2024, as part of Food for the brain international expansion, I was honoured to attend and speak at a conference creating a task force to ‘popularise prevention’ in the ‘silver-haired’ economy. I’d like to share excerpts from the speech given by China’s Former Minister of Health, Gao Qiang.
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Speech by Gao Qiang -China’s Former Minister of Health
“Dear esteemed leaders, distinguished guests, and fellow advocates for the development of the silver economy. I am delighted to join you here in Nanjing to discuss the topic of high-quality development in the silver economy. In his earlier presentation, Mr Ai Bo, the General Manager of Xiangjia Group, categorised the living conditions of elderly individuals into four stages: early ageing, active ageing, semi-active ageing, and disabled ageing. I fully agree with Mr Ai’s perspective and commend his boldness, as a young entrepreneur, to invest in the silver industry. However, I have one small suggestion: the living conditions of elderly individuals should not be defined solely by age but rather by their actual health status. Take myself as an example—while my age has technically surpassed the “active” stage, I still feel full of energy”.
Earlier, Patrick Holford also mentioned five criteria for optimal health, which align closely with the “Five Forces” standard I previously proposed for active seniors: physical strength, energy, intelligence, financial resources, and charisma. Physical and mental strength pertain to health, financial resources reflect economic stability, and charisma is the comprehensive result of personal influence. The above represents my personal understanding of health standards for the elderly population.
The most important issue at this stage in Asia and even globally…
This year, the State Council issued a key directive on the development of the Silver Economy. This is not the first time relevant Chinese authorities have introduced the concept. In 2021, the 14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Ageing Industry officially highlighted the importance of developing the silver economy.
China’s neighbour, Japan, as the country with the most serious ageing population in the world, and one of the first countries to enter an ageing society, proposed the concept of the silver economy as early as the 1970s. In 2008, the European Union also introduced and actively promoted the development of the silver economy. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Silver Economy is the most important issue at this stage in Asia and even globally. It is closely related to the duration and extent of a country’s ageing population. The more severe the ageing process, the more prominent the role of developing the silver economy. And now, the time for the development of the Silver Economy is just right.
A person with health does not necessarily have everything, but when health is lost, everything else is inevitably lost. This is especially true for the elderly, whose demand for health is even stronger. The decline in physical strength and energy is a natural process, and we cannot resist ageing, nor can we stop it. What we can do is slow it down, as this is an inevitable part of human development. The goal is to minimise illness in old age, prevent serious diseases, and promote long-term health and longevity. This represents the highest pursuit of health. Professor Chen Xiaobing’s interpretation of health is correct in the first part—‘health benefits longevity.’ However, I don’t entirely agree with the second part: ‘longevity does not necessarily mean health.’ Longevity without health is meaningless
I was impressed by Mr Holford’s closing remarks, where he stated that Western health maintenance mainly relies on medicine, but he hopes that in China, the primary means of maintaining health would focus on prevention—avoiding illness or preventing serious disease. Having recognised this, we must work even harder to implement and integrate this into all aspects of our work, especially in meeting the basic needs of the elderly—such as clothing, food, housing, transportation, and daily necessities.
Which aspect—clothing, food, housing, transportation, or daily necessities—is more important? Which development direction has the most potential?
I have conducted a systematic analysis on this, and the core lies in food and daily necessities. We have long passed the stage of food insecurity, and severe malnutrition resulting in physical damage is no longer a common issue. The focus now is on balance, even controlling nutritional excess and reducing obesity. Ensuring that the elderly eat nutritionally and beneficially is our primary goal. Achieving this requires collaborative research from multiple experts. Solely relying on doctors is not enough, as their advice is often limited to six simple words: ‘less salt, less oil, less sugar.’ But does reducing salt, oil, and sugar guarantee health? The answer is ‘no’; a balanced and reasonable diet is essential. Traditional Chinese medicine emphasises the idea that food and medicine come from the same source. In my discussions with related experts, I often stress that the concept of medicinal food is not enough on its own; it needs specific plans to support it. What kind of diet is beneficial for enhancing specific aspects of health? What kind of diet can enhance preventive effects? Only by addressing these questions can families across the country incorporate these dietary combinations and structures into their daily cooking.
Medications are not the primary means of healthy living
Most people are familiar with healthy living, but its scientific basis is not always well understood.Among the five major tasks within the five key elements of building a Healthy China, the primary task is to promote healthy living. This is a prerequisite for preventing various functional diseases and maintaining long-term health. However, whether this goal has been initiated, implemented, and started to produce benefits remains uncertain. Practitioners in relevant fields, including enterprises involved in the silver economy, need to promptly correct misconceptions—medications are not the primary means of promoting the widespread adoption of healthy living. What plays a larger role are nutritional supplements, health products, and adjunctive treatments.
Mastering these techniques would support health, prevent disease, and promote long-term well-being. ‘Daily necessities’ is the most promising area for development. It includes not just daily living products but also health supplements, entertainment products, and age-friendly items, among others.
In conclusion, I hope that the Silver Economy will become a new focal point in China’s economic development, not only serving the elderly population in China but also contributing to the global silver population, showcasing China’s wisdom and spirit of dedication to the world, bringing blessings to all.”
Speech by China’s Former Minister of Health, Gao Qiang.
Patrick Holford with President of the China National Health Association, Wu YingPing (to the left) , former Vice Minister of Health, Zhang Fenglou, and former Minister of Health, Gao Qiang (to the right)
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Wouldn’t it be refreshing if our health ministers were talking and thinking in this way?
We are on the brink of shifting from a drug-focused model to one centered on true prevention through optimal nutrition It is an exciting time.
Will you join us in our mission of making prevention the primary focus?
This paradigm shift first needs to start in your own body and home, so here is how you can begin
Order your DRIfT 5 in 1 test here so you can join our research and find out what your unique body needs.
Want the campaign to launch in your country, translated into your language? Can you invest or help us raise the money to make that happen? Contact nigel@foodforthebrain.org to find out more.
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Food for the Brain is a not-for-profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index to be able to advise you on how to dementia-proof your diet and lifestyle.
By completing the Cognitive Function Test you are joining our grassroots research initiative to find out what really works for preventing cognitive decline. We share our ongoing research results with you to help you make brain-friendly choices. Please support our research by becoming a Friend of Food for the Brain.
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other neurodevelopmental disorders, all classified as ‘neurodivergent’, have rocketed in both the UK and USA.
One in six children is classified as neurodivergent or in need of special education and and one in 36 is diagnosed as autistic – a fourfold increase in 20 years.
This cannot be explained away by genetics or better diagnosis.
On April 24th, we are hosting a multi-disciplinary team of global experts – coming together for a virtual conference in London to explore what optimum nutrition and lifestyle choices are needed for smart, happy and healthy children and teens and what is driving this escalation of cognitive and behavioural problems.
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The conference starts at the beginning – with pregnancy. Professor Michelle Murphy from the University of Madrid has found that the B vitamin status in the first trimester of pregnancy, measured with a homocysteine blood test, predicts problems, specifically withdrawn behaviour, anxiety or depression, social problems and aggressive behaviour in the child at age 6. Folate is one of these vital B vitamins and nine out of ten obese women in the EU fail to meet basic guidelines for folic acid supplementation to prevent neurodevelopmental problems.
At the Chelsea and Westminster campus of Imperial College London, Professor Michael Crawford’s team at the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition, based at the Chelsea and Westminster campus of Imperial College London, is discussing the importance of marine food in the maternal diet., They have identified which mothers are likely to have neurodevelopmentally impaired infants based on their blood fat levels,, with omega-3 DHA, found in oily fish, being a critical brain-building nutrient.
Professor Julia Rucklidge, Director of New Zealand’s Mental Health and Nutrition Research Lab at the University of Canterbury, will present evidence for the essential role of multivitamins and minerals both during pregnancy and in improving children’s mental health.
This kind of research is also helping to identify what the optimal intake of nutrients is to optimise children’s potential. Dr Alex Richardson from Oxford University is presenting her evidence for helping children with ADHD-like symptoms and paediatric endocrinologist Professor Robert Lustig from the University of California San Francisco is pioneering research showing the dangers of high-fructose diets. “Teenagers with blood sugar problems are showing early signs of the same kind of cognitive decline and shrinkage of the hippocampus that are seen in Alzheimer’s.” The youngest non-genetic Alzheimer’s diagnosis is age 19.
Two clinicians, assistant professor Dr Chris D’Adamo from the University of Maryland in the US and Dr Lorene Amet from France, will be presenting cases of children diagnosed with autism who no longer are diagnosable as such and discussing nutritional and other interventions that are helping autistic children lessen troubling symptoms. “We have over 200 cases of autistic children who have benefitted. The majority have shown significant improvements but not all respond.” Says Dr Amet.
Dr Tommy Wood, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at the University of Washington, will address the role of an active lifestyle, backed up by a presentation on the dangers of early smartphone use by Dr Jonathan Haidt, author of the New York Times best-seller ‘The Anxious Generation’. “The changes in diet, less active lifestyles and early smart phone use have created a perfect storm, negatively impacting a child’s healthy brain development. These are issues we have to address urgently for the sake of our children”, says Dr Tommy Wood, who heads research at the foodforthebrain.org, the charity hosting the conference.
The conference is opened by Dr Rona Tutt, OBE, past president of the National Association of Head Teachers and an expert in special needs. “People come in assorted shapes and sizes with brains that are unique. A significant minority who are neurodivergent, need to be recognised, valued and supported, so they can maximise their strengths and overcome their challenges. We need to understand what is driving this increase in neurodivergence and how to best support and optimise a child’s potential”, she says.
The conference, which is tailored for nutritionists, doctors, teachers, and health professionals, is also open to interested parents.
We also have a webinar for everyone (parents, carers etc), where we will dive deeper into the topic of optimising neurodivergence. Find out more about the webinar here.
The conference coincides with the launch of COGNITION for Smart Kids & Teens, which offers a free online assessment to all parents and teenagers as part of a global research project aimed at optimising children’s intellectual and emotional development.
Food for the Brain is a not-for-profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index to be able to advise you on how to dementia-proof your diet and lifestyle.
By completing the Cognitive Function Test you are joining our grassroots research initiative to find out what really works for preventing cognitive decline. We share our ongoing research results with you to help you make brain-friendly choices. Please support our research by becoming a Friend of Food for the Brain.
References
1 Roigé-Castellví J, Murphy M, Fernández-Ballart J, Canals J. Moderately elevated preconception fasting plasma total homocysteine is a risk factor for psychological problems in childhood. Public Health Nutr. 2019 Jun;22(9):1615-1623. doi: 10.1017/S1368980018003610. Epub 2019 Jan 14. PMID: 30636652; PMCID: PMC10261079.
2 Loperfido, F., Sottotetti, F., Bianco, I. et al. Folic acid supplementation in European women of reproductive age and during pregnancy with excessive weight: a systematic review. Reprod Health 22, 13 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12978-025-01953-y
The Only Person Who Can Change the Mental Health Crisis is YOU
By Catherine Verner
That’s why we want to say a heartfelt THANK YOU for being a CITIZEN SCIENTISTspreading the word and encouraging more people to make the brain-saving changes we champion at Food for the Brain.
From Humble Beginnings to a Global Movement
Two decades ago, the idea that nutritional and lifestyle choices could alter the trajectory of cognitive health was seen as a far-fetched notion. Back then, cognitive decline was considered inevitable. The idea was drowned out by entrenched beliefs and outdated medical paradigms that focused more on reactive treatments than addressing root causes.
At Food for the Brain, we dared to challenge conventional thinking. We envisioned a future where prevention takes centre stage. Our mission became clear;: to empower you with the knowledge and tools to take charge of your brain health, shape your future, and unlock your cognitive potential.
Thus began a journey that has grown into a global movement for building cognitive resilience and brain health.
Citizen Scientist Badge
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Prevention is the Only Viable Way Forward
The truth is, prevention has been sidelined in healthcare. Instead, healthcare systems are geared toward managing symptoms, dominated by pharmaceuticals, while underlying causes remain unaddressed.
The evidence is clear: proactive steps – like improving your nutrition, staying active, managing stress, and prioritising sleep – can prevent or significantly slow cognitive decline. At Food for the Brain, you are helping to prove that prevention is real, achievable, and essential.Through our COGNITION Programme, we identify and address the modifiable risk factors for conditions like Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline. If you haven’t started your journey yet, now is the time to act.
The Power of You: Citizen Scientist in Action
This progress has been possible because of you – our dedicated Citizen Scientists. By the end of 2024, more than 450,000 free Cognitive Function Tests have been completed worldwide. That’s extraordinary—and it’s thanks to you!
Your commitment drives our work forward. This isn’t the result of one team, but the collective effort of thousands across 70+ countries.
Every time you take a test, complete a questionnaire, or share your experience, you’re contributing to something bigger than yourself. You are part of a groundbreaking, people-powered movement that is changing how brain health is understood, measured, and protected. The data you provide doesn’t just sit in a database—it fuels new research, shapes prevention strategies, and strengthens our ability to fight cognitive decline globally. Because of you, we are shifting the narrative from hopelessness to empowerment. Together, we are proving that your brain health—and the health of millions—is not left to chance. You’re not just participating; you’re leading the way.
And today, we’re ready to go even further.
A New Frontier: The COGNITION Biobank
We are thrilled to announce the creation of theCOGNITION Biobank—a pioneering resource advancing cognitive health research.
Why does this matter? With the global cost of dementia projected to reach $2.8 trillion by 2030, it’s clear that prevention must be prioritised. For governments and healthcare systems to take action, they need hard facts.
Thanks to nearly half a million participants like you, the COGNITION Biobank integrates data from Cognitive Function Tests, health and lifestyle questionnaires, and biomarker results. This allows researchers to explore the links between nutrition, exercise, sleep, mental stimulation, and cognitive health.
Imagine researchers discovering that something as simple as adding omega-3s, improving sleep, or managing stress could cut dementia risk in half. Now picture thousands of people across the globe applying that knowledge to transform their futures. This is the power of the COGNITION Biobank. It’s not just data – it’s hope, answers, and a global step forward. Your contributions today are fuelling discoveries that could rewrite the future for your children, grandchildren, and people around the world. You’re not only helping yourself; you’re helping millions.
The Biobank is already one of the most comprehensive anonymised databases of its kind. This is where prevention meets action. Your participation drives real, global change. Your data is safe. At Food for the Brain, we take rigorous measures to ensure all contributions remain fully anonymised, adhering to GDPR and HIPAA standards.
Your Brain, Your Impact: Act Now
Your role in this movement has never been more important. Here’s how you can make a difference:
Join the COGNITION Program: Receive tailored steps to improve your brain resilience and track your progress.
Become a Friend: Support our mission with a small monthly donation and be part of the solution.
Share Your Story: Have you seen a positive change? Inspire others. Share your message by emailing Cath at research@foodforthebrain.org.
Spread the Word: Encourage your friends, family, and colleagues to take the test and join this global initiative. Order the Citizen Science Action pack here
Citizen Scientist Pack
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Together, we’re proving that prevention works.
Your brain matters.
Your actions matter.
Let’s pioneer the future of brain health—together.
Food for the Brain is a not-for-profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index to be able to advise you on how to dementia-proof your diet and lifestyle.
By completing the Cognitive Function Test you are joining our grassroots research initiative to find out what really works for preventing cognitive decline. We share our ongoing research results with you to help you make brain-friendly choices. Please support our research by becoming a Friend of Food for the Brain.
After a lifetime dedicated to pioneering nutrition and mental health, Patrick Holford—founder of the Institute for Optimum Nutrition (ION) and the visionary behind Food for the Brain—will be stepping down as CEO in 2025 (but will remain very much involved). Over the past 40 years, Patrick’s radical and impactful work has included establishing ION, writing 47 books translated into 30 languages, and building Food for the Brain into a global force for mental health support and prevention.
To mark this milestone, we’re delighted to share this exclusive interview with Patrick Holford by Simon Martin Editor of IHCAN magazine. From humble beginnings—selling self-published books from the back of a battered Skoda—Patrick’s mission has transformed into a fast growing, global research and education charity, changing lives by promoting prevention and optimal nutrition to address the increasing prevalence of mental health challenges.
Discover Patrick’s journey, his insights, and what’s next for his enduring legacy.
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SIMON MARTIN: Let’s start at the end, with your latest project – preventing Alzheimer’s. Did you get interested in Alzheimer’s because you’re worried about it yourself, or because you saw where things were going?
PATRICK HOLFORD: Some years ago, I realised we knew what to do to prevent all these chronic diseases, and it HAS to be prevention. And as much as I love the whole mission where I started from, creating the profession that could then theoretically work with doctors and lots of people, the issue is, “How do you do prevention on a big scale?”
I’ve pondered that for many years. And then I thought Alzheimer’s might be a very good place to start, although ten years ago, “Alzheimer’s is preventable” was a radical statement. But I figured it would become the number one fear and the number one killer and the number one health cost. Since it is, in essence, irreversible – once you’ve got holes in your brain – you’ve got to think about prevention.
I also rather loved the homocysteine research, which was pure functional medicine or optimum nutrition. In other words, we’re not all the same, sometimes you have to test. The use of nutrients to reverse a process is very clear in the world of homocysteine, and in fact arguing that case, which is also the case for B12, opens up the door for supplements, which, of course, is a bête noir for the medical establishment. They’re very happy to talk about a bit of diet and exercise, but the concept that one might actually have to take a supplement, and that it might in fact even work better than a drug, is a big paradigm shift. So I decided to focus on Alzheimer’s prevention. In truth, when you look at it, the eight drivers, as we organise the data, are just as applicable to diabetes or heart disease or anything else.
SM: I was reading the news this morning and the Daily Mail had two “health” stories. One was a “Probiotics will kill you” type headline on a complete mess of a case report where doctors had given a bacterial pill to someone who was seriously ill with a number of overlapping diagnostic labels, and he died. Then they decided to feature a new study that claims that everything from turmeric to ashwagandha can give you liver disease. I mean – it’s 2024, and they’re still at it.
So as we celebrate ION’s 40th, part of the history we should look at is how often we’ve been first with stuff, from supplements, to probiotics to junk food – or ultra-processed foods as they call them now – and orthodox medicine is still catching up. With Alzheimer’s, of course, we’re ahead again.
But let’s rewind to the start. I was upset to realise that I don’t have a picture of our first meeting, which was when I was editor of Here’s Health, so must have been around 1980. I think you were working for Green Farm at the time.
PH: My first awakening really was at Green Farm through Brian and Celia Wright, who had some very interesting ideas about nutrition.
I was studying psychology at York university, and even then I was very interested in consciousness and mental health. I didn’t really have nutrition on the map, and so I was really learning from them. When I left university, two things happened. One was I was introduced to the book by Dr Carl Pfeiffer called Mental and Elemental Nutrients…
SM: I still have a copy on my shelf. PH:…which is really brilliant. And then I was introduced to the research of Dr Abram Hoffer. I didn’t realise at the time, but his double-blind trials on high-dose niacin in the ‘50s were the first ever on a nutrient in the history of psychiatry. I’d already dabbled in various forms of psychotherapy and I was thinking of going in that direction and by whatever quirk of fate, York university was doing quite a lot of research into schizophrenia. I remember at the time saying, “Could we meet one please?” But that didn’t seem to be on the agenda.
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Where the interest in mental health began…
SM: What do you mean – “meet one”?
PH: Could we meet someone suffering from schizophrenia. Because I had got into construct theory, which is to do with the fact that when we talk about depression, for example, what you mean by depression and what I mean are very different things. They’re constructs. So in my holidays, I was volunteering in alcohol addiction centres. I joined a group for heroin addicts who had a choice of going to prison or going into this sort of reform school. So I went to work there, and I met schizophrenics; I just wanted to know the nature of the beast, so to speak. And around that time, I bumped into Brian and Celia, who I invited to give a talk for us. We were very into neurochemistry at York. I wasn’t so interested, but it gave me a good background in neurotransmitters and all that sort of thing. So it was that perfect storm of Carl Pfeiffer, Abram Hoffer, studying schizophrenia, learning neurochemistry, that got me excited.
Somewhere around about 1980 or so, I’d set up a health food shop in High Wycombe called the Better Health Shop, and a little room in the back called the Better Health Clinic. I called myself a nutrition consultant and I had a three-month waiting list. I developed a questionnaire, which was sort of the beginning of the questionnaire that nutritionists or nutritional therapists use today. Then I had a few people approach me saying they’d like to study to do what I was doing.
Also around that time, I remember suddenly having this realisation – perhaps all these diseases, like diabetes and heart disease, mental illness and so on, maybe they’re all a function of sub- optimum nutrition!
Right then I decided to set up an institute, or a college or whatever.
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It started with orthomolecular medicine…
SM: Where were you getting your inspiration from at that point?
PH: I was well into the whole concept of orthomolecular medicine – the right molecules – which was really the creation of Prof Linus Pauling and Abraham Hoffer. Pauling had published the seminal paper in 1968, originally on orthomolecular psychiatry.
SM: The paper that starts: “The functioning of the brain is affected by the molecular concentrations of many substances that are normally present in the brain. The optimum concentrations of these substances for a person may differ greatly from the concentrations provided by his normal diet and genetic machinery”.
PH: I didn’t really realise it at the time, but this concept is totally in parallel with Darwin. In every edition of The Origin of Species he said that there were two driving forces for evolution: one was “conditions of existence”, and the other was natural selection. Of the two, he said, conditions of existence is the more important. If you think about it logically, natural selection doesn’t kick in until the conditions of existence change.
Prof Michael Crawford made me aware of that, with the simple question of how did we become human? Given that our genome is only 1.4% different from a chimp and that brain size in chimps and gorillas hasn’t changed at all, and ours did… the logic is it had to be a change in the conditions of existence.
He pointed out that in 1900 to get into the Army you only needed to be five foot tall. The Industrial Age diet with its refined flour and sugar and all the rest of it happened to ignore protein as we moved away from “standard” eating to man-made eating. But with the discovery of the importance of protein and going to work on a good British breakfast etc, effectively we go from five foot to six foot in a matter of 50 years.
The point that he was making is that conditions of existence, when they change – epigenetics, in effect – this works very, very fast.
The power of changing the conditions of existence is extraordinary. So whether you call it orthomolecular, or optimum nutrition or functional medicine – Jeff Bland also was a student of Linus Pauling – we’re talking the same language, and what we’ve learned is that when you create that perfect “conditions of existence” – environment – and nutrition is a big part of that, it works fast, and you can see extraordinary recovery from disease processes.
In the early days, there I was with this questionnaire and I’m a Nutrition Consultant. I’ve trained in quite a few other things as well – massage, reflexology, Bach flower remedies, kinesiology and this and that, but I found the nutrition was really working, so I cut my hair, and I got a suit and a room somewhere off Harley Street.
This is pre-ION, about 1981, and I remember a woman coming in saying, “I have systemic lupus erythematosus and Sjögren disease”. I said, “How do you spell it? What is it?” I told her, “I don’t really know about your condition, but I know about optimum nutrition”. And she got better.
And then on the same day, somebody came in with post-epidemic myalgic encephalomyelitis. I said to myself, “You think you’ve got a problem? The last one had SLE and Sjögren’s!” And he got better as well! So I grew the confidence that if you create that, “conditions of existence”, things can get better.
SM: There’s a pattern here that I’ll explore later to do with both logical thinking and your ability to tap into expert advice that I think explains a lot of your success – and the success of ION.
But as an example, you had double Nobel Prize winner Prof Linus Pauling on board early on?
Patrick launching COGNITION in China
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Back in the 80’s when nutritional therapy didn’t exist…
PH: Yes, and another influential person around that time was Prof Derek Bryce-Smith at the University of Reading. He was a genius organic chemist, who effectively got lead out of petrol. I worked with him on his campaign, and he had also got into trace elements, zinc, selenium, manganese and so on, in the context of women who were having miscarriages and deformed babies and so on.
At the time, you had to go through a formal process to be able to register an institute, and Derek Bryce-Smith was one of the key signatories for that and was the first patron of the Institute for Optimum Nutrition. Prof Pauling was the second.
SM: Staying with the “origin story” for now…I well remember the 1980s, because obviously nutritional therapy as a profession didn’t exist. In the Here’s Health office we were regularly visited by Pearl Coleman, who lived nearby and was pushing us all to learn about the new field of allergy. At that time, there wasn’t a single specialist clinic in the NHS for allergy. Pearl championed Dr Richard Mackarness, who was single-handedly pioneering “clinical ecology” at Basingstoke Hospital until he was closed down.
[Mackarness, it’s worth saying, wrote Eat Fat and Grow Slim – a low-carb, keto, “Stone Age” program in, wait for it, 1958!]
The late great Leon Chaitow had just started writing for Here’s Health and was trying to introduce his naturopath-osteopath colleagues to supplements. In the magazine we railed against junk foods, promoted a wholefood diet and campaigned for organic gardening and farming. Our classified ads were the main source for people looking for a nutritional practitioner – and we vetted their qualifications. And that was the extent of what was going on with what we would now call nutritional therapy. There were just these oddball characters, with all due respect to Pearl, who were fanatical about this nutrition thing. It was very much a specialist, minority interest. So along you come and start an institute. Did you have from the start a big vision for what this would become?
PH: There was a big vision. And we had 73 students sign up for the Nutrition Consultants Diploma Course in the first year, so it didn’t start small!
Around then I had a very important meeting with Dr Stephen Davies and the journalist Geoffrey Cannon.
SM: Stephen Davies was amazing. He had a photographic memory and as a result his presentations on nutrition were mind-blowing. We did feature him and his colleague Dr Alan Stewart. They were “conventional” medics who had woken up! They came out with their book Nutritional Medicine in 1987.
PH: The essence of the conversation was, how do we make change happen? How do we bring this nutrition into existence in a significant way?
Geoffrey’s view was that nothing would change until you change the establishment, the major organisations. Stephen Davies said, “This is evidence-based medicine, and therefore it should be done by doctors”.
My view was it wasn’t going to happen like that. I thought that if we could create a profession of nutrition consultants who could work with doctors, doctors could refer to them, and then we might have a chance. So that was the function of the new profession, and I am so delighted that it’s taken off!
SM: I don’t remember you doing much marketing, but the thing just grew and grew.
PH: One thing that was important with the Institute is that rather than me teaching everything, I decided to get the best people I knew on each topic. Within a couple of years we would have, on average, five or six professors lecturing in a year. Prof Crawford came, and Dr Neil Ward, professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Surrey. The students rated every lecturer on content and delivery, and that was the basis of improving the education.
SM: And then you started writing…
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Selling books from the back of a Skoda.
PH: Before I started ION I’d been selling supplements. I bought myself a cheap Skoda and whizzed around the land and sold Brian and Celia’s herbal and nutritional products. But when I asked if I could either buy in some shares or have a pay rise, they fired me.
I lived in a cottage in Burwash that I rented, and I didn’t have a phone, but there was a phone box. And I didn’t have a typewriter, but the neighbour had one. And the owner of the farmhouse wouldn’t let me use the address for a business, but the village greengrocer would.
Even though I’d been fired from Green Farm, they gave me a good wholesale distributor rate. So I wrote an advert ,which was incredibly successful, with the headline: “Don’t waste your money on vitamins”. And there were three action points: 1, “Read this book” – which didn’t exist; 2, “Ring the nutrition telephone service; and 3, “Buy these products”. So I thought I’d better write a book!
A friend did a drawing, and I went to a printer and said, “I’ve got £1,000. How much would it cost to print 10,000?” And he said, £3,000. And I said, “Well, if I give you £1,000 in 30 days and £1,000 in 60 days, 90 days, do we have a deal?” He said yes, so I had 10,000 books printed, jumped in my Skoda, and just drove around the UK. I’d knock on radio shows, and sometimes I’d give a talk – to six people, or maybe even 20 or 30 if I was lucky – and sold 8,000 copies. And then Thorson’s turned up and said they’d like to publish my Whole Health Manual, and they went on to sell a quarter of a million. So that provoked a lot of interest about the training, as well.
SM: Did you rename it as The Optimum Nutrition Bible, because that title gets mentioned most often in our In Practice section when we ask what book first inspired practitioners?
PH: The first one came out in 1981 and when Thorson’s republished it in ‘82 or ‘83 it did catalyse a bit of a revolution. And then in ‘85 or so I published Optimum Nutrition, and a few other books – The Fat Burner Diet was one of the early ones, one of the first on a low GI diet, and then The Optimum Nutrition Bible – which everyone remembers the most – in 1997. I wrote that when I left ION, which is when I went into a mad writing frenzy when I was released from running the Institute.
SM: So the growth of ION was really fuelled by you and your Skoda and selling books. People read the book and decided they wanted to know more.
PH: Yes, I remember getting an article in Cosmopolitan or an article here and there, and gradually the whole thing evolved – not without you know, “troubles”. There were troubles along the way. I’m sure we remember a few of them…
SM: And here we are with “the” book just translated into Chinese and about to hit a market of umpteen millions…but what’s your current book count?
PH: It’s 48 books in more than 30 languages.
SM: You always amaze me that you not only have great ideas, whether it’s ION, Food for the Brain or the Alzheimer’s campaign, but you’re incredibly productive. What’s the secret?
PH: I think it’s because I see where things are going. I’m not really a good manager, and I get bored quite easily. But when I have a strong sense of where something is going, I get focused on that. I’m very bad at the past. I got 8% in my history exam, but I did well in maths and economics.
So yes, there’s a sort of perseverance. When an idea forms in my mind that I think has got arms and legs, I just keep going. What I’ve certainly learned in relation to books, and also in life, is to totally absorb myself in a subject. And work hard. So when I’m writing a book, I’m up at 5am and I’ll always do three hours before the day begins.
I wrote The Optimum Nutrition Bible in six weeks. Not many of my books have taken more than two months. The essence is – and we saw this recently with my latest book, Upgrade Your Brain,- also the campaign – it was a purposeful, two-month campaign, just do everything – conferences, lectures, interviews, just make as much noise as you possibly can in a very short period of time to get a quantum leap. You cannot get a shift in an organisation or in a concept just by working nine to five, hoping it will steadily change. There needs to be some sort of burst.
I remember the concept of “natural highs”: I was giving a lecture at a conference in LA and met Dr Hyla Cass, associate professor of psychiatry at UCLA. I was a bit bored, and so was she. And those words dropped out of the sky. I mean literally. What? Why do we humans like to be, sometimes stimulated, sometimes chilled, sometimes concentrating, sometimes connected?
What’s the nature of those different states and how do they relate to chemistry?
We worked on that book, and out of that came supplements – Brain Food, Chill Food, Mood Food, and so on. Conceptually this was very early on and a bit radical for the health food industry. No one wanted to run with it, so I did it myself and then later they caught on. And it just amazed me that we had to wait more than a decade until the idea that you could have supplements, nutrients, and actually support your brain function, caught on.
So yes, it’s having an idea that I think has merit, and doing it and sticking with it until eventually it starts to get traction.
SM: That sounds fine, and I can understand that for the odd book and the odd project: you get an idea, you intuit that something’s going to happen with it, and you devote this burst of time to it, and just keep repeating that. But ION, 48 books and who knows how many other projects later and you’re still applying that same model. So why aren’t you a shrivelled husk of a human being by now?
PH: Well I am a bit more shrivelled! But I also I love that – and this has been so true with Food for the Brain and the charity – it’s the people that have come forward to get involved…
SM: So you get help?
PH: No question. If an idea is good.
In a sense, it’s all about raising consciousness. I should say that what’s always floated my boat is expanding my awareness, my consciousness of something. The effect of my lectures – and I think this is also true with most of the books – it’s not about the content, it’s about somehow inducing a big “Aha!” in someone that wakes them up to the idea that they are definitely the architects of their own brain’s destiny.
We’ve seen that so often in nutrition. For example, once somebody gets a cold or flu and takes a gram an hour of vitamin C, and experiences a different flight path, they never look back.
The other point in answer to that question is that I met Linus Pauling a couple of times in
the US, and had lots of interactions with him before he died. And it was a very seminal moment when he said, “Patrick, follow the logic; it’s the logic that counts”. He said to not worry about the randomised control trials – they come later. That was really important. So I trusted the logic of things, and I trusted conditions of existence, and I trusted the power of nutrients.
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Mentored by double Nobel Prize winner & involving the great minds of our time
SM: So people are attracted to what you’re doing and they step in. But explain this. you’ve got your psychology degree and you’ve invented yourself as a nutrition consultant, and then you decide to go and connect with a double Nobel Prize winner. How do you do that? Because you seem to have a capacity to not only reach out to people, but to get them interested in what you’re doing.
PH: Well we didn’t have emails, we had to write letters. I wrote to Linus Pauling, I wrote to Abram Hoffer. I said I’d like to visit, and I jumped on a plane, I went there, and we connected. That’s how I learned. I found someone whose ideas were excellent, like Prof Michael Crawford, for example, and I wrote to them, went to meet them, and so on. So many of these scientists are humanitarians – they want their work to be shared. And so many have been phenomenally patient with me, directing my ability to accurately turn their science into something that the public can understand.
But I think they often really enjoy the questions. And they’ve enjoyed the desire to put it in the public domain, because quite a few are not that good in the public domain, but they know it’s important. So it’s not a title that exists, but it’s a communicator role. You’re also very much there. And it’s perhaps easier to put the hat on you and say “journalist”, but it amazes me how these people, these scientists, spend decades of their life in minute details, struggling to get grants, often extremely badly paid, and hoping that it will make a difference. And the old belief was, if it’s published in a journal, it will make a difference, but we now know that that is not true. So yes, it’s not difficult to reach these people, if you’re on the same track and you ask decent questions.
SM: And you get them involved, how?
PH: Well now we have emails and it’s easier.
I just read a beautiful paper from a lovely professor at the University of Maryland on two cases of severe autism, reversed – loved your report in IHCAN on that. So I dropped him an email, and I explained the concept of everything we’re doing and said, “I’d love to talk”. He got back to me and said,“I adore what you’re doing. I’ve checked it out. It’s totally in alignment, let’s talk”. So he’s on board because we’re launching COGNITION for smart kids and teens next year.
SM: It’s telling that they don’t dismiss you because you’re some kind of popular nutrition guru – they take you seriously. Would you say that’s again down to the quality of the questions you ask? I’m plugging away at this because, as you mentioned, your career has not been without some pushback, to put it mildly, and this seems to indicate a new appreciation, not necessarily for you personally, but for nutritional therapy as a serious endeavour in general.
Experts in the Alzhiemers Prevention Group
PH: Well it’s just bringing people together – they tolerate me! I do ask interesting questions sometimes, but we have these Zoom meetings, and people love them – and they disagree with each other. Recently I did a brain fat think tank and then an anti-antioxidant, anti-ageing brain think tank, and I get three scientists together, and I pose questions, and the best ones are quite “Vulcan”; they’re happy to say “I don’t know of any evidence for that” – unlike GPs, who seem to be trained to never say “I don’t know” – and they love the exchange.
It’s just about the science. It’s about the logic. It’s the old Linus Pauling line of “follow the logic”. It doesn’t really seem to be so relevant what my qualifications are as such. And you know, I’m not writing a letter to the Lancet.
I always thought professors talk to professors more, and doctors talk to doctors more, and so on. But no, it’s very rare that somebody doesn’t respond. And that’s what I also thought was so lovely about optimum nutrition, is that it isn’t a fixed thing. It can mutate, it can change as we learn more. It doesn’t have to be quite so static.
Sometimes supplements are my focus, but I think the important point is what Pauling and Hoffer did, to suggest the use of nutrients at amounts bigger than you can eat in order to reverse a disease process – that was a paradigm shift. And that’s why I can agree with many people who are big into diet and sugar and organic and this, that and the other, but it’s amazing how often people just shut down on the concept that a nutrient might be necessary to supplement.
The wonderful thing with Alzheimer’s and homocysteine and so on is, if your homocysteine is raised, you need 500mcg of B12 and it will come down. Well, you won’t do that with 10mcg. David Smith wrote a beautiful thing, which is the charity’s statement on supplements, that basically says the requirement is whatever corrects the disease.
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Genetics is like a weak light.
SM: With nutrigenomics and DNA tests and all the rest of it, we can now individualise our own diet and supplement regime. Or do you not buy into that?
PH: I’m not dismissing it, but polymorphism is like a weak light, which in the darkness of changing nothing, you can see as increased risk.
People are scared about ApoE4. The other obvious one is MTHFR C677T, so I thought I would just look at the big papers on changing diet, supplements, omegas or B vitamins, and of course they’ve all measured whether there was ApoE4, or not, and MTHFR or not, and then I looked up the results – and the results of the interventions were no different. I only found one study where the “positive” gene test was associated with a difference. We’re not denying that MTHFR C677T, if you have it, increases your risk of dementia, schizophrenia, depression. It increases your risk, but not that much. It’s 4-6%. Everyone gets a bit messed up with absolute and relative risk, and suddenly the headline says more like 30%.
So yes, knowing the genetics is useful. But don’t get too hung up on it. Change your diet, take some supplements etc – the significance fades away.
More interesting are situations like the DHFR polymorphism, which means you really can’t use folic acid. It doesn’t work. I’m only just learning that it’s very prevalent in Southeast Asians, but not prevalent in Europeans. And some of the folic acid studies have done better in Europeans and worse in Southeast Asians.
So I think there are, you know, there are some real merits, but I still think “conditions of existence”.
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Patrick’s own ‘conditions of existence’
SM: What about your own conditions of existence? What’s your own diet and supplement regime if you have one? Mine varies all the time…
PH: Sometimes I call myself a “pegan”, which is a pescatarian pagan vegan! I’m dairy allergic. I think a lot of people coming into nutrition will have had a health problem, and mine was terrible sinus trouble and ear trouble – embarrassing. So I learned that dairy didn’t work for me. I don’t really react to gluten. I don’t have much, but I don’t totally avoid it. And I was fascinated by the work on Kamut Korasan, with every study showing a massive reduction in inflammatory markers. Now that is highly glutinous wheat, right? So it’s not just gluten.
I didn’t eat any meat for 45 years, and now I’m not averse to some, but if I never ate meat, it wouldn’t bother me. I don’t salivate when I see a steak. But I worked out a long time ago, when I was exploring macrobiotics and then vegan, the evidence on omegas was so compelling that I did eat fish.
So I do make a conscious effort in that direction, whether it’s mackerel, or taramasalata, or salmon, but I’m quite fussy about where it comes from. I drink very little alcohol and I never had coffee until I met my lovely wife and she got me “addicted”. We grow our own vegetables and yes they’re organic, biodynamic, zero dig or whatever, but we’re working with a guy called Dan Kittredge of the Bio-Nutrient Research Institute, who has analysed thousands and thousands of plants, and the nutrient variation, for example, antioxidants in carrots, is 40-fold, and you can’t predict the antioxidant level from organic or biodynamic or zero dig.
SM: What about your supplement regime? Does that change?
PH: I always take a high-strength multi-vitamin, I always take extra vitamin C. I have these strips, because life’s too short to be rattling loads of boxes. Fortunately, the guys that make these make my 100% Health Pack. So I’ve got a high-strength multi, a gram of vitamin C, plus zinc, omegas…and those three I take twice a day, every day, getting that better utilisation over six hours. And in that pack is something called Brain Food, which is phospholipids and a few extra B vitamins. And then I take an AGE Antioxidant, which is alpha-lipoic acid and resveratrol and CoQ10 and all that good stuff.
But where it gets interesting is, we’ve now learned that the amount of vitamin D that’s optimal is whatever gets you at least above 75 nanomoles per litre, or probably 100; and now we learn very clearly that you’ve got to be about 8% on your omega-3 index…so if you’ve got the time and the money, you can check in and see what’s actually working on your body. And then when you start to look at the evidence for DHA, it’s at least 500mg per day, possibly 1000mg milligrams a day.
The other aspect of this optimisation thing – and it comes out of some of those very early concepts of genes interacting with environment – is looking at evolutionary models, such as humans not making vitamin C and so on.
They found this 40,000-year-old complete Homo sapiens remains in the Gower and worked out that at least 20% of his diet was seafood. It’s fair to assume that they were expending two or three times the calories that we do – no Ocado, no home delivery, no cars. Everything was walking, foraging, maybe hunting, collecting wood…and there’s nothing flat in Wales. So if 20% of their diet was marine food, and we imagine that we were coastal, living in estuaries, migrated out of Africa. So let’s assume that was normal, and that’s how our brains grow. We’re expending half of the calories that they were on, then 40% of my diet would have to be marine food to get what they were getting. When you work out how much phospholipids you would be getting, how much choline, how many omegas, how much B12, iodine, selenium…you’re getting to what the nutrient researchers show. So you can approach the question of optimum nutrition from a number of different directions – biochemistry and logic, evolution studies and so on.
Patrick growing Lions Mane Mushroom.
SM: That is a great connection to make.
PH: I think that I’m just lucky, because I’m 66 and I’ve been studying since I was 18 or so, and a bit like you, there’s barely a day when you’re not reading some paper somewhere or learning something new. And also, because I’ve got my scientists on a network, they send me stuff.
Now you could have a 25-year-old, super bright, straight As and everything, and they have just not had the time to have absorbed all this material. That’s why I say I’m lucky. I’ve got “sensors” that ask “Does that really fit an evolutionary model? And this finding doesn’t really fit with this…”so when everything comes together, you feel very confident about it.
SM: One of the things that stops me writing more books is that I’m aware that as soon as I’ve written one, it’s out of date. You don’t seem to be bothered by that. You just do another book, I guess. Is that how you operate?
PH: The thought of going back and updating my books is a nightmare. Yes, I do it when I’m really embarrassed! I did it with my book on arthritis, and I did it with Improve your Digestion, but there’s not a lot that is “wrong”, it’s just that we discover new things. I’m looking at my book Say No to Cancer. Now, there are some seriously good books out there on cancer, but if someone’s been diagnosed with cancer, they’re in a state of fear and disempowerment. That book is actually empowering. Later on they can get into ketones and whatever, but some of the brilliant, detailed books – if you’ve got hold of that in your first two months of cancer, unless you happen to be that sort of person, you’d just be completely overwhelmed.
I guess if you’re writing books as encyclopaedias, it’s a problem, or is it something that opens up an area? So I’m not so worried about it, but you’re right. I mean, there’s so much stuff coming through, and you must feel quite overwhelmed at times. You do an incredible job making it accessible. I don’t know how you do it.
SM: Well thank you and back at you. As you know, you can be inundated with new material and some of it just “sticks” and you know it’s important and needs a follow-up. You can let the rest go. From your VERY aged perspective then, from the beginnings in the back room to ION and kick-starting a whole profession into existence, where do you think it’s going? What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Where would you steer us?
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Not always the most popular opinions
PH: Funnily enough, in the time since I left ION, there are times when I’ve been flavour of the month, and times when I haven’t been…
SM: Well, that’s a very restrained frame for what the media and certain academics have put you through…
PH: I’ve taken the flack a few times, I think, for the profession. And at that time, most people flee, so you don’t generally get much support. So yes, there’s been a sort of nervousness around ION – for example, in relation to supplements, because of potential attacks or whatever. And I would just say to everyone to, as I do, always follow the logic, follow the science, and be bold and brave, because nutrition is always amazing. The power of nutrition is always amazing.
I love the way that ION has been run over the last several years. It’s really tough to run a charity, and it’s done very, very well.
My intention was simply that people would be really good at what they were doing, and if they were and got really good results, then they would get more clients. They would be successful. But there is still this disempowerment, where we look to the establishment. We want to be recognised by some authority, thus have our degree status or whatever. My personal view is that although that’s a very good thing, it’s secondary.
I believe ION was four times at the point of getting degree status without achieving it (it has now), usually because there are vested interests who do not want nutritional therapy to become mainstream. So there’s a debate as to what extent you change what you’re teaching and learning in order to get some accolade from the establishment, so to speak. And I would say, whatever happens we have to stick to our guns. We have to do what works. We have to do what the science shows. Be like those Vulcans: don’t be persuaded just by opinion.
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Chromium, homocysteine and methylation
SM: Fads and fashions rather than fundamentals?
PH: I’ve been a little bit shocked, because I have interviewed various people qualified in nutrition for various jobs, and everyone has something to say about the microbiome right now. Yet it’s extraordinary how many know very little about homocysteine and methylation.
And then one of the questions I always ask when I’m interviewing various nutrition therapists in mental health is about the very good work on high-dose chromium being an effective antidepressant. That was shown by a brilliant psychoanalyst professor who had a patient who got better taking chromium, and not from psychoanalysis. So he set up a randomised, placebo-controlled trial. In other words, there are some learnings along the way and some things that have just been forgotten in nutritional therapy and functional medicine.
For example, you’ll find that the homocysteine-methylation thing is quite ignored in America, but not in Scandinavia, and it’s a bit more known in the UK. So you get these geographic differences. And things go into fashion, and then they go out of fashion.
An early influence: the ground-breaking book by Dr Carl Pfeiffer, famous for Pfeiffer’ Law: “For every drug that benefits a patient, there is a natural substance that can achieve the same effect”.
Founder of the Brain Bio Centre, he was one of the first physician-scientists to investigate the biochemical basis of mental disease.
“If there’s a drug that can alter the brain’s biochemistry, there’s usually a combination of nutrients that can achieve the same thing without side-effects”, he wrote.
So yes, I just say stick with the science. Stick with being highly confident in the effectiveness of optimum nutrition.
But then, I watch how it has evolved. It’s fantastic. I mean, it’s an established profession. I think BANT has done an incredible job.
You know, it’s a very active, vibrant and alive community. But one has to know that there are companies who make money because they have products, and they need new products, and they need new tests, and sometimes they have the money for the marketing and all the rest of it, which is fine, because it helps to support the whole industry in one way or another. But you must always have your BS detector turned fully on. Antennae on, not to just get sucked into the latest fad. For example, the blood sugar issue is vital, however you deal with it. The whole methylation-homocysteine thing is vital: I mean, David Smith’s paper showed homocysteine is a marker for more than 100 diseases.
SM: Yes, thanks to you we got that covered in IHCAN – it is a staggering piece of work.
PH: “It’s bigger than you think” sort of thing, right? And then fats are not just omega-3s. And vitamin D – which is a weird one, really, because we put it in the “fat-soluble vitamin” zone.
SM: Even although we should actually be treating it as a hormone…
PH: And even with vitamin D’s effect on COVID, we don’t really know why. It’s got so many potential genetic switches and all the rest of it. But no, I’ve tried to fit it in with the others. It doesn’t fit. And then there are the antioxidants and polyphenols – we finally got the glutathione index test up and running all over the place. That’s really a nice measure, because, you know, people like Dr Tom Levy say, it’s all about oxidation and antioxidants.
SM: So, back to fundamentals, and I know you see the future as “digital” – what does that mean for us?
PH: I worked out quite a few years ago that the only way to affect major change was that it had to be digital, it had to be international, and it had to change people’s behavior. It took a few years for others to buy into that, but then we did this crazy project with the cognitive function test. But almost every day we have 150 people take the test. We’re up to 450,000 people now. My goal is to have data on a million people, which makes us bigger than anything, bigger than UK Biobank, by the end of next year.
SM: So by “digital”, you mean you’ve got to use the internet, apps and tech, rather than flogging books from the back of your Skoda?
PH: Rather than just a book, yes. And I think, also, nutritional therapists have learned that only doing one-on-one consulting is not the way to go. The successful ones tend to have different routes to them – so coaching and sessions and a package that you buy into. And that comes from the whole concept of, how do I change a person’s behavior? If I see them once, and then a month later I see them again, and a month later I see them again – it’s very hard. So what’s the method that creates that behavioural shift?
For myself, I started doing three-day residential workshops called Total Health Transformation, where I saturated people completely in an environment where it wasn’t just nutrition, but if we learned something about food, we then cooked it together, and we’d eat it together.
So it’s how to wake someone up to actually do that. This is all part of ION, too, because it’s also when you realise that it’s not just what you know, but it’s knowing how you actually change behaviour.
So in the time when I was running it, we were learning a lot of psychological techniques, also marketing techniques, knowing that 80% of it was psychological and 20% was about the knowledge about nutrition.
The truth is that for 80% of people, it’s about some very simple things – the fundamentals that we mentioned: blood sugar, antioxidants, fats, methylation. Most problems can be solved with something that we could probably learn in a month or two, and it’s just those extra, difficult cases where you really have to go to a whole, other layer.
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Future predictions
SM: You see things coming so what’s your prediction for the nutritional therapy profession? The NHS is permanently in crisis and yet many practitioners seem keen to get more involved with GPs and the whole system.
PH: My view is that the NHS-type, conventional medical system is beyond repair, and it will get worse and worse. It’s happening in every country. I also think that the pharmaceutical approach, although it still looks strong, is really, really weak. And we knew from ten years ago when Heather Stein of GSK said the only way they could sustain profits was not from blockbuster drugs, because they didn’t have any, but from vaccines.
Pharma holds up the whole broken system. And all our lovely doctors, like in the Public Health Collaboration, or all the fabulous GPs who are part of groups within the NHS trying to make change happen, say it’s like pulling teeth. It’s just so painful. So people are not getting better, so more and more people are going to look at “What’s my alternative?”, and our job is to provide that and make ourselves available in a way that is accessible, affordable and so on.
SM: What’s the best way to do that?
PH: The important thing is for us to be very good at what we’re doing. But again, I think practices need to go much more digital.
We are in a digital universe. 60% of access to everything is on a mobile device. And it’s no longer about what paper you read and what television program you watch. There’s much more influence these days through podcasts and YouTubes and social media. So it’s just simply understanding how to meet people’s needs – which they’re just not getting from their doctors.
Be available – whatever that means to you. With Zoom, for instance, we can reach people anywhere in the world, and with AI we can have instant translation, “speak” their language and understand them even if they don’t speak English.
We need to just stay on target: what is it we do that really works? What are people’s needs? How do we package what we are doing to be available to people? And people tell people.
The future is bright, because there’s no lack of supply of unhealthy people! It should be shrinking, but in most areas, it’s growing, and what treatment is available for them is less and less available. If we wind back 15 years, there were blockbuster drugs that were very sexy, and now there aren’t. So our area is getting very messy and no one wants to wait a month to see their GP and then get referred, and then have to wait again for something that’s probably not going to work anyway. Whatever they’re talking about doing with the NHS, it’s just so slow and it’s probably just not going to happen.
SM: So 1978, I’m at Here’s Health, you’re at Green Farm and what are we talking about? Get people to stop eating junk food. Fast forward 46 years and what’s the hot topic? Ultra-processed food. It’s bad for you, apparently. Who knew? It’s frustrating, isn’t it?
PH: I went to one of the Public Health Collaboration conferences, maybe three years ago, and they’d have patient cases up, and for everyone, the answer was a sort of low glycemic load and sort of keto diet. And that was the answer for everything they wanted. Very, very exciting. I was so glad to be hearing this, a bunch of fantastic doctors saying this. But the other side of this is that I was saying this in the 1980s.
SM: Exactly. And did you get credit for it? No.
PH: And the other thing is at this conference, there wasn’t a single mention of micronutrient supplements. Well, there was a talk about the need for “proper studies” where you get a drop in the HbA1C in randomised trials and meta- analyses. And I raised my hand and said, “You know, there have been 28 randomised control trials on chromium that have been meta-analysed, and lowered HbA1C by the amount you’re talking about. Is there any chance, maybe next year, we’ll chat about micronutrients?”
So more and more doctors waking up to low-carb, and in this first wave it’s also no pills or fewer drugs, which is fantastic but the medical profession is still paranoid about nutrient supplementation. And we know that what actually works is to both change the diet and supplement the right nutrients. And that is orthomolecular medicine, that is optimum nutrition, that is functional medicine.
SM: So we have doctors turning on to diet and nutrition, but they won’t do supplements, so we are still about ten years ahead and able to provide science-based recommendations that the public just won’t get anywhere else.
PH: Yes, and this paranoia towards supplements is illustrated by the Lancet Commission totally ignoring homocysteine despite all the evidence because the solution is a supplement.
It also tells you that if you have a Prof Tim Spector or Dr Chris van Tulleken, anyone who comes through has got to nutrition through a medical route. They’ve had implanted in their DNA an anti-supplement bias. And you know, they’re just not processing science. That’s the point. So we have to stick to the science, be confident in the evolution of nutrition and conditions of existence, and just get good at changing people, which means coaching to facilitate behaviour change. We have to empower people because the only person who can change you is you.
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Actions:
Join COGNITION by becoming a FRIEND to get access to a personalised 6-month program to upgrade your brain
Food for the Brain is a not-for-profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index to be able to advise you on how to dementia-proof your diet and lifestyle.
By completing the Cognitive Function Test you are joining our grassroots research initiative to find out what really works for preventing cognitive decline. We share our ongoing research results with you to help you make brain-friendly choices. Please support our research by becoming a Friend of Food for the Brain.
It’s been an incredible year for our small charity, which has experienced an amazing growth spurt—expanding tenfold in just two years!
Reaching and helping millions of people to dementia-proof their diet and lifestyle through over 80 seminars, webinars, TV and radio interviews and podcasts worldwide.
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Going global with COGNITION!
Personally, I am exhausted and with my last burst of energy, I headed off to the Far East – China and Japan for the whole of November – to launch the translated Cognitive Function Test to up to 18 million people. Then I’ll collapse on a beach somewhere in Thailand before returning for Christmas!
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New faces to the small but mighty team!
Meanwhile, we have appointed the wonderful Emma George, a naturopath and experienced project manager, as Managing Director. Emma will take over as CEO in January giving me more time to teach and reach influential groups of people to ‘Upgrade Your Brain’. Emma is supported by an amazing team of highly skilled and committed people. It’s the teamwork that makes the dream work – the shared dream of Food for the Brain, which is educating and empowering people to take control of their mental health.
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Emma George is an accomplished leader with over 20 years of experience in organisational development, health, and wellbeing. As current Managing Director of the Food for the Brain Foundation, Emma brings her expertise in strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, and project delivery to drive Food for the Brain’s mission of promoting cognitive health through nutrition and lifestyle interventions.
Emma’s career highlights include leading national and European health projects, such as the Welsh Government’s Healthy Working Wales scheme, where she directed a team to assess and enhance workplace health initiatives across the nation. When not at work, Emma enjoys engaging with community projects, and teaching at the School of Naturopathic Nutrition, reflecting her dedication to creating a healthier future for all.
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Most of the Team in Wales this Summer.
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The largest independent COGNITION Biobank – research with no profit motive!
None of this could have happened without you, our Citizen Scientists and of course our Friends of Food for the Brain who are 2000+ strong.
It’s because of your willingness to take the test, and share your data (anonymously) that has helped create the largest independent COGNITION Biobank research database and enable real research to help people without a profit motive.
If you haven’t become a FRIEND yet then please do so here. We are completely independent so each FRIEND is helping us make a difference in the world!
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“I became a FRIEND and joined COGNITION last September because my memory was terrible! My Dementia Risk Index has gone down from a start point of 52.35 to 37.45%! My weight was 12st 2lbs and is now 10st 11 lbs and I’ve really got a handle on keeping sugar intake very low. I have 4 green areas now and I’m very excited about getting my life back and could never have achieved it without the COGNITION Programme.” Janette, 68
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Want to make a larger donation to help our Smart Kids Programme?
If you’d like to become involved in this radical research revolution, beyond being a FRIEND, email Fran, Head of Donations & Engagement at donations@foodforthebrain. Currently, we need funds to help finish building COGNITION for Smart Kids through the SPONSA Donna campaign.
Meanwhile, as the Festive Season approaches, we have quite a few exciting things coming your way:
What’s happening this Christmas at Food for the Brain?
The Christmas DRIfT 4 in 1 discount! Get your family or community to become Citizen Science researchers this festive season – order the test kit here and use code XMAS10 to save 10% internationally.
Looking for a stocking filler? Then the Upgrade Your Brain Book is the perfect gift – order here.
For test kits and the book, order before 16th December for Christmas delivery
Thank you for reading!
Food for the Brain is a not-for-profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index to be able to advise you on how to dementia-proof your diet and lifestyle.
By completing the Cognitive Function Test you are joining our grassroots research initiative to find out what really works for preventing cognitive decline. We share our ongoing research results with you to help you make brain-friendly choices. Please support our research by becoming a Friend of Food for the Brain.
For those who felt they missed out on the uplifting and enlightening Upgrade Your Brain seminars, Patrick is coming to Wrexham, Leeds, the Yorkshire Dales and Glasgow at the end of October, giving 2 hour Upgrade Your Brain blockbuster seminars and an exclusive one day Upgrade Your Brain retreat in the Burgoyne Hotel in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales. See details and book your place here.
Translations are in full swing and Patrick is going to China and Japan to launch the project at the end of November. We are immensely grateful to Mr Ai of Sharejoy in China where Patrick has been training the staff who will help spread the word, and Dr Atsuo Yanagisawa, President of the Japanese Orthomolecular Society, for their generous support.
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Meanwhile, thanks to our growing army of Ambassadors, we have launched COGNITION in Australia and New Zealand – thank you Linda, Drs Ron Erlich and Ian Brighthope for your support.
Although the blood tests are not yet available there, Alice Coulson is spreading the word in Kenya as our East African Ambassador. Asante Sana!
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Alice Coulson and Patrick in Kenya Ron Erlich and Linda Conder
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Not only will we be able to reach and help millions of people to dementia-proof their diet and lifestyle, it also means that our research database will become the biggest and most comprehensive in the world. This means that researchers will want to access our data, created by you as Citizen Scientists, to do their research.
This expansion of knowledge is vital to change the whole health paradigm.
To achieve all this, which requires major technical advancements, server power and investment, we are launching COGNITION International Ltd, a company wholly owned by the charity, to maximise the potential. We do need investment and can offer what are called ‘redeemable preference shares’ for ‘impact’ investors who want both a return on their investment and their money actually being used to make a difference. If you might be interested contact Fran on donations@foodforthebrain.org.
But also know that this continued rapid growth of Foodforthebrain.org, the COGNITION project, and the ongoing development of COGNITION for Smart Kids and Teens, would never have happened if you, FRIENDS of the charity, giving £50 a year, hadn’t supported us.
In the past year we have grown to 2,000 FRIENDS. If you have yet to join please support us in this way and help us reach our next goal of 3000! You can also pay £5 a month if that is easier for you.
Food for the Brain is a non-for-profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index to be able to advise you on how to dementia-proof your diet and lifestyle.
By completing the Cognitive Function Test you are joining our grassroots research initiative to find out what really works for preventing cognitive decline. We share our ongoing research results with you to help you make brain-friendly choices. Please support our research by becoming a Friend of Food for the Brain.
Thanks to you, Food for the Brain has grown ten-fold in the last year, reaching another half a million people, with over 20,000 taking the Cognitive Function Test bringing the total to 420,000. In the last three months alone we’ve reached 2 million people and tested the cognitive function of a further 20,000.
Yet, every 3 seconds someone in the world is diagnosed with dementia – in the UK that’s 7 double decker buses worth of people every day.
At the other end of the spectrum, special needs schools are bursting at the seams as autistic spectrum disorder diagnoses go through the roof.
Thanks to generous donations from the Fieldrose Trust, Viridian and Heights, we’ve finally built our research database and are beginning to find some interesting things.
Firstly, cognitive function declines, almost in a straight line, from age 18 to 90+. That’s a completely new discovery! Even 25 year olds have less cognitive function than 20 year olds. That’s why the earlier a person starts to make changes the greater are their chances of never developing dementia. You’ll be pleased to hear that the lower your Dementia Risk Index, calcuated from the COGNITION Questionnsaire you complete as part of the free online test, the better your cognitive function is and people making the changes recommended in the COGNITION programme can REVERSE cognitive decline.
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Jan is a case in point. Like the ‘average’ person his cognitive function was declining year on year – until he joined COGNITION.
Here’s what he says: ‘Food for the Brain’s COGNITION programme has really helped to focus my mind on key changes, a step at a time. Since following their advice, I’m delighted to report that my cognitive function, which was close to the red after 17 months of decline, has returned into the green, better than the average for my age. I had lost my job and my ability to have a productive life, even my ability to speak without long pauses, and any hope of recovery. Food for the Brain’s educational support through COGNITION has demonstrated the potential for recovery such that I now have confidence and increasing hope for the future. Food for the Brain has been my lifeline’.
Smart Kids – the children are our future
Natalie Coghlan, now appointed as Head of COGNITION for Smart Kids & Teens, is applying everything we’ve learnt from adults to children and teens and is running a small pilot study on 5 to 17 year olds to find out what happens in early years, how we can measure it and – ultimately how we can help children and teens become more mentally and cognitively robust. Please watch this short film from Natalie.
We’ve raised about £5,000 to kick-start this project but need to raise a further £35,000 to see it through to completion. If we can do this, we hope to launch COGNITION for Smart Kids and teens early in 2025.
That is where SPONSA DONNA comes in.
Donna Von Tunk is sailing around the world and partnering with us so she can raise awareness and funds for this important project. If, collectively, we raise £1 a mile we’ve done it. That means 100 people giving 1p a mile (£400).
Now here’s a shocking fact – the Alzheimer’s Society have told us they don’t fund or focus on prevention.
Nor do Dementia UK. They focus on supporting carers.
Alzheimer’s Research UK allocates less than 4% to non-drug prevention research, despite 80% of Alzheimer’s and dementia being preventable – and none of their current projects are interventions – to find out if a prevention action works for example.
I’m afraid to say it’s drugs all the way, with £5 million going into a study involving testing blood levels of p-tau in 5000 people as a predictor of cognitive decline. That’s £1,000 per person.
Since testing cognitive function, which we do FOR FREE, is how you diagnose dementia, why not just do this? The most direct way to best predict who is heading for cognitive decline is to test cognitive function itself since it reduces many years before a diagnosis. £5 million would puts 100,000 people through our COGNITION programme helping them to actually dementia-proof their diet and lifestyle. The only logic for this p-tau test is to then say ‘you need the drug’ just as your cholesterol level became the proof that you need statins – which have not worked in any independent study that’s not funded and controlled by the drug makers.
Having failed to find a single UK charity who are taking prevention seriously it really is down to us to drive the prevention action forwards.
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Announcing the COGNITION Biobank project
You’ve probably heard of the UK Biobank. People like me, aged 40 to 69 back in 2006, gave blood, filled in questionnaires and did tests. We are all being tracked to see if we’ll develop dementia or other diseases. No-one is being retested.
Here, at Food for the Brain, we have the COGNITION Biobank.
If you’ve taken the Cognitive Function Tests you’re part of it. To date we’ve tested 420,000 people AND we encourage you to retest cognitive function every six months or year. Also, we are now encouraging you to test blood levels of key biomarkers such as homocysteine. In this way you become a Citizen Scientist. The UK Biobank didn’t do this, so they never mention homocysteine-lowering B vitamins, which is ‘the most promising treatment’ according to the largest reviews of 396 trials on Alzheimer’s prevention. Also, we ask the right questions in our COGNITION questionnaire because, back in 2006, they didn’t really understand what was driving cognitive decline.
We hope to have the largest Biobank, specific to cognition, tracking hundreds of thousands of people over time AND encouraging them to make changes by sharing back what works from this research.
This is science for the people, by the people, funded by the people.
On that note, we need to raise £1 million, £50,000 at a time to take this project global and big-scale. We are looking for impact investors, with at least £10,000 to invest, with a guaranteed return, much like an ISA. Wouldn’t you rather your invested money was saving people’s brains? Also, unlike other charities where, for every £10 given, £3 goes into fund-raising costs, at Food for the Brain 100% of what you donate goes directly into prevention research and education. We are lean and focused, all working virtually.
Our Head of Research and Principal Investigator is neuroscientist Dr Tommy Wood, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. He’s a systems-based thinker and gave an amazing talk at our recent Upgrade Your Brain conference.
You can watch him in action here giving a stunning presentation on a systems-based approach to cognitive function. The diagram below is from his talk. We’ll be publishing a paper on this soon.
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Prevention is more effective & available right now
Not only are literally no other charities taking prevention seriously, or keeping up to date with the evidence that is streaming in almost weekly, none have any comprehensive model as to how cognitive decline occurs and how to keep your brain healthy.
Quoting Alzheimer’s Research UK, whose strapline is ‘we exist for a cure’ they say: “don’t smoke, keep cholesterol and blood pressure under control, be active daily and exercise regularly, maintain a healthy weight, eat a healthy balanced diet, drink fewer than 14 units of alcohol per week.” That’s it. Let’s face it – who didn’t know that? That’s not exactly going to reverse the dementia epidemic.
Despite part funding the original Oxford trial on B vitamins, which showed up to 73% reduced rate of brain shrinkage, compared to approx. 20% increased brain shrinkage from the latest anti-amyloid drug treatment, their Chief Medical Officer Dr Peter Schott says: “Dietary supplements are big business, and plenty of websites sell vitamins on the promise of boosting brain health. But supplements are only recommended for people with a diagnosed deficiency, and should be taken with a doctor’s support.”
What on earth does he mean by ‘diagnosed deficiency’?He ignores the fact that about half those over 65 are deficient, indicated by a homocysteine level above 11 mcmol/l. How many doctors even know that, let alone are testing for it? Some test serum B12 but, in the UK, the reference range for this is wrong. In the EU, Japan and Canada if your level is below 500pg/ml you’re deficient. This is correct. In the UK the cut-off level is 180pg/ml. This is wrong. Brain shrinkage is happening below 500 pg/ml. Homocysteine is the most important and predictive test which is why we test it as part of our research. It’s included in the DRIfT test and can be tested on its own – see foodforthebrain.org/tests. Lowering high homocysteine with a 10p a day B vitamin is the single most effective, and cost-effective, prevention action anyone can take. We had it costed by Oxford University’s health economist and found that just this would save £50 million a year in the UK. The next best evidence-based prevention action is to up your omega-3 level (test your omega-3 index here)] to find out how you are doing) and eat a lower carb and low GL diet (glycaemic load goes further than the glycaemic index as it takes into account the portion size of the food).
Now that would make a difference.
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SEEKING A CEO/OPERATIONS DIRECTOR
Having helped shape Food for the Brain’s strategy, and helped it grow exponentially, I need to focus on getting the word out there – teaching as many people, public and practitioners, as possible, getting media coverage, helping spread the word. That’s what I’m good at. In September we launch in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In November we launch in Japan and China, thanks to generous donations, and I’m going out there to launch the Cognitive Function Test, teach and spread the word. Next we seek donations to translate all this into Spanish and Portugese.
So now we really need a good leader and team player who knows how to get things done, working with our brilliant, highly functional small-but-mighty team. This is a part-time, paid position, with the potential to grow full-time as the charity expands. If you think you might have what it takes and have the combined skills of marketing and operations, digital development and are also able to lead and represent the charity with my full support, plus a background and passion for nutrition and mental health, get in touch by sending your CV to me at patrick@foodforthebrain.org.
Wishing you the best of health and happiness,
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Thank you for reading!
Food for the Brain is a non-for-profit educational and research charity that offers a free Cognitive Function Test and assesses your Dementia Risk Index to be able to advise you on how to dementia-proof your diet and lifestyle.
By completing the Cognitive Function Test you are joining our grassroots research initiative to find out what really works for preventing cognitive decline. We share our ongoing research results with you to help you make brain-friendly choices. Please support our research by becoming a Friend of Food for the Brain.
