—
So if you want to learn the 8 steps to optimise your brain for better mood, memory, sleep and stress resilience and dementia proof your diet and lifestyle then here is a free sample of the book, written by our CEO & founder Patrick Holford.
—
—
—
Introduction
Do you often feel gelatinously exhausted? Enthusiastically negative? Do you spend your days feeling tired and wired? Your evenings with a drink in hand? Your nights restlessly searching for sleep? Do you wake up anxious and stressed and in need of a coffee to get going? Do you forget what you were doing, forget people’s names, forget where you put things?
In 2010, I did a survey of over 55,000 people who had completed my online ‘100% Health Check’ at patrickholford.com.
These are the results:
Does this sound like anyone you know?
Something depressing is happening to humanity, and possibly you. The very thing that makes us human, that is our brain and intelligence, is in rapid decline.
We are fundamentally different from chimpanzees, with a brain size of under 0.4kg, despite sharing 98.5 per cent of the same genes, precisely because of our intelligence, directly reflected in our larger brain size. This gradual increase in brain size, driven by a brain-friendly diet, not genes, over 6 million years, is the unique hallmark of Homo sapiens. But both brain size and intelligence are decreasing – in the case of IQ, by an estimated 7 per cent a generation! Our average brain size, which peaked at 1.6 to 1.7kg 30,000 years ago, is now averaging less than 1.35kg. That means we’ve literally lost 20 per cent of our brain in the last 30,000 years and the signs are that this brain degeneration is speeding up.
This parallels a worrying increase in mental illness across the world. Diagnoses of anxiety, depression, dementia, ADHD and autism are all increasing at an alarming rate. One in six children are classified as ‘neurodivergent’, with autism rates alone seeing a four- fold increase in 20 years, while one in four over 80 have mild cogni- tive impairment (MCI), sometimes called pre-dementia. Even more worrying is the evidence of brain shrinkage in adolescents and memory decline in those in their thirties. It is the greatest health threat we face, according to the World Health Organization.
Indeed, this is a global phenomenon that is accelerating at an alarming scale. Depression is the leading cause of disability, and in the UK alone, one in six adults were prescribed anti-depressants last year. Yesterday, again in the UK, more than nine double-decker buses worth – about 800 – people were diagnosed with dementia. What on Earth is going wrong and what can we do about it?
‘We are heading for an idiocracy,’ says Professor Michael Crawford, director of the Institute of Brain Chemistry, whose research at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital can predict which pregnant women are going to have pre-term babies with a higher risk of developmental problems. If nothing changes, by 2080 half of all children are likely to have a degree of neurodevelopmental impairment.
It is scary stuff, because our humanity is in decline, which can be seen manifesting in hate speech, extremism, mass shootings and suicides, which have become, globally, a greater killer than all wars and murders combined. Clearly, modern man, Homo sapiens, is neither wise nor happy. We are literally losing our higher brain intelligence – emotional control, sense of connection, sharp cognition, purpose and innate happiness. Yet intelligence is something we need more of, not less, as we face the challenges of over-population, climate change and pollution. We need to work together in an intelligent fashion, not stagger from war to war, depleting finite resources.
This is not just my opinion, but the opinion of a worldwide group of scientists, most eminent professors and experts in their field, whose interviews in this book are key to unravelling why our mental health is in decline, and what we can do to reverse this trend.
Fortunately, there are things we can do, individually and collectively, to reclaim our brains – to upgrade them.
Your brain upgrade may be experienced as a rapid improvement in your mood, as Gabrielle, a former depressive, found. ‘I’ve been trying to feel like this for 25 years – I’m over the moon!’ she said. Or a reduction in stress, as retail manager Andrew reported: ‘‘My energy is through the roof, I don’t feel stressed and I have no problem sleeping.’ Or regaining the ability to think straight, as Stephanie, a lawyer, related: ‘After a week, the brain fog and tiredness were significantly better.’ Or even the reversal of serious mental illness, as Liz, a former schizophrenic, found: ‘I’ve been fine.’ You’ll hear their stories, and what made the difference, in Parts 2 and 3. They are all ordinary people, like you or me, whose lives were made unbearable by changes in brain function, and put back together again by taking steps to regain brain health.
My interest in this field started back in the 1970s, when I became fascinated by the human condition. As a teenager, I read Jung and Freud and thought psychotherapy might be my career path. I went to university to study it and became fascinated by the brain, how it works and what goes wrong with it. I have been studying intelligence and mental illness ever since.
In the 1980s, I founded the Institute for Optimum Nutrition (ION) with Professor Derek Bryce-Smith, the UK chemist who campaigned to get lead out of petrol because it was lowering children’s IQ, and twice Nobel Prize winner Dr Linus Pauling as patrons. This has since trained several thousand nutritional therapists in what is now a degree-accredited profession.
In 1968, Dr Linus Pauling, together with Dr Abram Hoffer, wrote, in a seminal paper in Science journal, that ‘The provision for the individual person of the optimum concentrations of important normal constituents (nutrients) of the brain may be the preferred treatment for many mentally ill patients.’ He coined the phrase ‘orthomolecular psychiatry’. I call this approach ‘optimum nutrition’ and others call it ‘functional medicine’. Dr Pauling spent the last 38 years of his life researching vitamin C and its effects on mental health, addiction, viral infection, cancer and heart disease, and putting nutrition centre-stage in healthcare. If only he and others had been taken seriously, then we might not be facing this terrible cerebral tsunami. ‘Brain health conditions have become a global health emergency,’ said the Federation of European Neuro- science Societies last year.
Back in 1985, when I was supervising one of my first students, Gwillym Roberts, the headmaster of a secondary school, we wondered if giving an optimal intake of vitamins and minerals might improve IQ. We designed a study and enrolled a sceptic, Professor David Benton from the University of Swansea, to run the trial and also invited the BBC documentary series Horizon to film it. Thirty children in Gwillym Roberts’s school were given a multivitamin and mineral, thirty a dummy placebo pill and thirty nothing at all. The study found that non-verbal IQ increased by 7 per cent (roughly the average decline per generation, according to Scandinavian researchers; more on this in Chapter 3) in the children taking the multivitamin and mineral. As well as being the subject of a Horizon documentary, this study was published in the Lancet, and hit the headlines of national newspapers, firing up interest in nutrition and mental health. If we had known then what we know now, I am sure even these positive improvements could have been enhanced.
In the 1990s, I set up the Brain Bio Centre in London, at the Institute for Optimum Nutrition, to treat people suffering from a wide variety of mental health concerns.
Across these past 40 years, I’ve had the chance to study under the leading lights in mental health, from the late Dr Abram Hoffer, the Director of Psychiatric Research in Canada who successfully treated over 6,000 schizophrenic patients, to David Smith, Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford, and Helga Refsum, Professor of Nutrition at the University of Oslo, whose impeccable studies of nutritional treatment have shown up to 73 per cent reduction in shrinkage of the Alzheimer’s areas of the brain in a year, compared to placebo, and effectively no further memory loss in people with pre-Alzheimer’s, which is leagues ahead of any anti-amyloid drug treatments.
You’ll meet many other world-class experts in other fields that impact the brain health, such as Dr Robert Lustig, Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology and a member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, who has unravelled how junk and ultra-processed food, clever marketing and tech have got us hooked on their products by manipulating the brain’s antiquated ‘reward system’, with the insidious downside of a spiral into depression and anxiety and hopelessness; also, Associate Professor Tommy Wood at the University of Washington, who’s an expert on how to ‘exercise’ your brain for more power. I’ve interviewed many more, such as Associate Professor David Vazour, expert on the gut-microbiome–brain super- highway; Dr Simon Dyall and Professor Michael Crawford, experts on omega-3 and the importance of the right brain fats; Professor Jeremy Spencer, who knows the foods, high in polyphenols, that help the brain to work; also, Professor Stephen Cunnane, an expert on ‘ketotherapeutics’ – how ketones, made from fat, can be used for a brain energy boost. These, and other leading lights, are part of our Scientific Advisory Board at the charitable Food for the Brain Foundation, which I founded in 2006.
Each of these highly intelligent, focused, pioneering professors has a piece of why our brain function and mental health are in sharp decline, and a piece of the solution. This book is about putting those pieces together until it becomes obvious what you need to do to upgrade your brain and become part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Psychologists, often unaware of the driving force of nutrition in brain health, may tell you mental health issues are all down to psychological factors, and psychiatrists may extol the virtues of the latest anti-depressant drug or sleeping pill, while sociologists may say it’s all to do with the pressures that ensue from the digital and industrial age we live in, but clearly this global decline in mental health is not happening because of a breakdown in social connection or a lack of drugs, and although you will see how the combination of junk food, junk media and tech addiction are contributing to a general dumbing down, that’s not the whole story either.
In this book you will discover what has created the perfect storm that is hitting the brain right now:
In Part 1 you’ll discover why this brain drain is happening – and why you’re not being told the whole truth.
In Part 2 you’ll learn the eight steps you need to take to upgrade your brain and restore full brain function.
In Part 3 there are specific ‘action’ chapters that will help you improve your mood, end anxiety and insomnia, build stress resilience, break free from addiction, sharpen your mind and memory, and ultimately reconnect to your sense of meaning and purpose.
There’s also a chapter on how to maximise your child’s attention, focus, creativity, intelligence and potential. If you want to jump to these chapters and get started, please do, but do take the time to read the eight steps, as these apply to all, and because that will also motivate you to make the necessary changes to your diet and lifestyle.
Finally, in Part 4, I show you how to go from victim to change agent – to not only change yourself, but also help support the paradigm shift that has to happen, putting nutrition for the brain at the top of the health agenda and finding a healthy way to live in this fast-changing digital age.
With all we know now, it is not only possible to prevent cognitive decline, but to enhance brain function, intelligence, memory, concentration and mood. Take heart.
Wishing you the best of health and happiness, Patrick Holford
—
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.
