Worst foods to avoid for your brain health

If you want to make the right decisions in confusing times The right foods are a kind of clean-burning fuel for your body’s biggest energy hog: Your brain. We’ve covered some of the best foods for your brain in our previous article, but equally important is what foods to avoid. In this article we will share insights into how to protect your brain health and even prevent Alzheimer’s disease using a key dietary strategy…

First of all we would like to say "A Healthy Lifestyle Equals a Healthy Brain" researchers explain, Your brain is not “programmed” to shrink and fail as a matter of course as you age. We now know that every activity in which you engage be it exercise, the foods you eat, the supplements you take, your personal relationships, your emotional state, your sleep patterns all of these factors dramatically influence your genetic expression from moment to moment. And this, in turn, influences your overall health and risk of disease.

Certain lifestyle strategies that promote neurogenesis and regrowth of brain cells include the following.. 

• Exercise. Physical activity produces biochemical changes that strengthen and renew not only your body but also your brain—particularly areas associated with memory and learning. 
• Reduce overall calorie consumption, including intermittent fasting. 
• Reduce carbohydrate consumption, including sugars and grains. 
• Increase healthy fat consumption. 
• Increase your omega-3 fat intake and reduce consumption of damaged omega-6 fats (think processed vegetable oils) in order to balance your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. I prefer krill oil to fish oil here, as krill oil also contains astaxanthin, which appears to be particularly beneficial for brain health. 

All of these strategies target brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which promotes brain cell growth and connectivity increasing your brain power.

Second thing you should watch very carefully what goes in your gut. According to Experts, much of our current brain diseases, stems from the fact that we are contaminating our immune systems with proteins to which the human immune system has never been previously exposed to in the history of mankind. So here is a list of some foods you should watch.....

1) Gluten (MSG)
Gluten sensitivity is involved in most chronic disease, including those affecting the brain, because of how gluten affects your immune system. Unfortunately, many people, including physicians, still believe that if you don’t have celiac disease, gluten is fair game and you can eat as much of it as you like. 

However, virtually all of us are affected to some degree.This is because when we eat gluten we all produce zonulin in the intestine, because of which Gluten proteins, makes your gut more permeable, which allows undigested proteins and gut contents such as bacteria to get into your bloodstream that would otherwise have been excluded. 

Once gluten upregulates permeability in your gut, it then becomes “leaky” and all manner of previously excluded proteins—including casein and other dairy proteins—have direct access to your bloodstream, thereby challenging your immune system and contributing to the loss of self-tolerance, resulting in inflammation and autoimmunity.

2) Energy drinks/ excessive intake of caffeine

Caffeine is a stimulant, so it can increase alertness. By encouraging the production of adrenaline (which is linked to our fight-or-flight reflex), caffeine can improve productivity and concentration. Ever heard of the concept “too much of a good thing”? You did...OK 

If you "over do" on caffeine—too many cups, a jolt of caffeine from the late afternoon onward, a Red Bull cocktail—it can mess with your shuteye schedule. 

Caffeine works by competing with adenosine, a chemical produced by the brain. Normally, adenosine binds to receptors to slow down nerve cell activity, but caffeine takes adenosine’s place, preventing it from doing its job at these locations in the brain. As a result, the activity of these nerve cells increases. This affects several parts of the body, including our central nervous system, the kidneys, muscles and the cardiovascular system.

Caffeine starts working as soon as 15 minutes after consumption. It takes about six hours for half of the total caffeine consumed to be eliminated from the body. Sleep is reboot time for your mental computer, and you don’t want to mess with it. 

3) Unripe and unready fruits
Some fruits like blueberries contain antioxidants which protect the brain from free-radical damage and cut your risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Unripened fruit is highly acidic and has a sour taste, which can overwork your digestion and leave you with a stomach complaint. Here’s a cool tip: if your favorite berries are out of season, buy them frozen. The freezer locks in peak flavor and nutrients, so the berries’ antioxidant capacity is maxed out.

Those pale, tough, and expensive off-season berries usually ripen in a warehouse, rather than on the bush, so they’re nutritional impostors compared to the real thing.

4) full fat icecream
Not all fats are created equal: Beware foods high in saturated fats, which can clog blood vessels and prevent the flow of nutrients and blood to the brain. Ice cream is not a brain-healthy food.

5) Soda

A study from the American Journal of Public Health found that people who drink 2½ cans of soda daily are three times more likely to be depressed and anxious, compared with those who drink fewer. So a Mountain Dew is a Mental due.

6) Candy

Sugary foods incite sudden surges of glucose that, in the long term, cause sugar highs and lows, leading to a fuzzy state of mind. So you’ll need to avoid all the attention-busting sugar bombs.

7) White chocolate

White chocolate isn't a chocolate at all, since it contains no cocoa solids. So it won’t stimulate the euphoria-inducing mood boosters like serotonin, as real chocolate does. Grab the real thing, the darker the better. More cacao means more happy chemicals and less sugar, which will eventually pull you down. 

8) Alcohol

This one’s  worth mentioning anyway. A drink or two can increase arousal signals, but more than that will actually depress your nervous system. This makes you sloppy, not sharp.

So next time watch what you gobble.