The brain is the most complex organ in the body. It regulates everything from body temperature to memories to breathing and generates thousands of thoughts every day.
So, how do we keep our gray-and-white matter in top form?
That’s what we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, the co-hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast — asked Dr. Madhureeta Achari, a neurologist in independent practice for 30 years, when she recently dropped by our studio.
Achari said the “No. 1 reason” for many of the problems she sees in patients is that they are “nutritionally deficient.”
The United States is suffering from “high-calorie malnutrition,” she noted, which means individuals are eating a lot of food but aren’t getting the vitamins and minerals they require from it.
“The brain has to have a balanced diet,” she said. “In terms of vitamins … each of them does something. It’s like a finely tuned machine. So you can’t just fix one part, right? It’s like a car. If everything’s great, but one tire is flat, the car is still not going to go.”
Achari advised that if trying to get everything we need to keep our brains in superb shape feels “overwhelming,” we should concentrate on “eating the rainbow.”
“[We should be eating] lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains — I think 90% of us, or something, consume most of our grains in an ultra-refined form. We need to go back to whole grains, whole foods, meats, fish, poultry that is whole … and you want some dairy, and you want some nuts and seeds … and you want to try to, throughout your day, get all of those things.”
Achari tells her patients to avoid supplements that claim to enhance brain function and instead focus on nutrition.
“They don’t help you,” she said, noting that the “wellness industrial complex” has promoted the “weird idea that somehow we are smarter than our bodies.”
“We are not smarter than our bodies,” she emphasized. “Our ancestors lived a certain way, they ate a certain way, they did certain things, and that’s the reason we exist today.”
So, if you want to keep your brain as healthy as possible, “feed your cells” a wide variety of foods full of micronutrients daily, Achari said, and chew your food well.
“Eating means chewing,” she told us. “There’s this new culture of smoothies where everything goes into the gut before your teeth have ever chewed it. Teeth are the first part of the digestive system.”
Chewing activates enzymes in your mouth like amylase, which helps break down the food and ”[wakes up] your microbiome to get ready to consume and absorb all the things that we need to absorb.”
We also chatted about how alcohol and cannabis can affect our brains (and what Achari always does after treating herself to a martini), what kind of exercise she recommends, and much more.
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For more from Achari, visit her website.
Need some help with something you might be doing wrong? Email us at [email protected], and we may investigate the topic in an upcoming episode.