At the new year, many of us make resolutions around health and diet. For this January BrainStorm, we discussed how food acts as fuel for your brain, the importance of healthy “brain fuel,” and why eating healthy every day is perhaps harder than it should be.

In his latest book, Food Fix, Dr. Hyman makes the case that our food and agriculture policies are driving obesity and food-related chronic diseases, including Alzheimer’s and related dementias. “After decades of caring for patients with chronic illnesses predominantly caused by food, I realized I couldn’t cure diabetes or cancer or heart disease or Alzheimer’s in my office—that it was cured on the farm and in the kitchen, in restaurants and grocery stores,” he said.

"In 10 years, 83 million Americans will have three or four chronic diseases, compared to 30 million in 2015," he continued. "Most of them will be the disease cost-drivers: cholesterol, blood pressure, stroke, cancer, osteoarthritis, diabetes. Most of those are also independent risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease. Not every case of Alzheimer’s or heart disease is food-related, but the majority of these chronic illnesses are commonly linked by mechanisms that have to do with what we’re eating. About 60 percent of our calories is processed calories. Most of that is starch, sugar, flour, and it’s driving this metabolic dysfunction that’s resulting in 88 percent of Americans being metabolically unhealthy.”

In 2008, Dr. Hyman wrote The Ultra-Mind Solution: Fix Your Broken Brain by Healing Your Body First - The Simplest Way to Defeat Depression, Overcome Anxiety, and Sharpen Your Mind. Comer observed, “You were ahead of your time.”

“I was treating people with physical illnesses, and their brains would get better," he said. "I’d treat them for asthma or acne or digestive issues, and their depression or anxiety would go away. I would optimize their diabetes, and their memory would improve. I wrote the book to explain how people can optimize their brains by dealing with the fundamental lifestyle factors that are really underlying most of our brain dysfunction. We now know that depression is an inflammatory disease of the brain. So is autism, ADD, and Alzheimer’s. The question is, what’s causing the inflammation? We eat an inflammatory diet—that would be the number-one cause.”

More studies are proving a link between cognitive health and lifestyle choices, but they include exercise, social interaction and diet. Comer asked, "Are these weighted equally?"

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