New York Times Bestseller
Discover the critical link between your brain and the food you eat and change the way your brain ages, in this cutting-edge, practical guide to eliminating brain fog, optimizing brain health, and achieving peak mental performance from media personality and leading voice in health Max Lugavere.
After his mother was diagnosed with a mysterious form of dementia, Max …
After his mother was diagnosed with a mysterious form of dementia, Max Lugavere put his successful media career on hold to learn everything he could about brain health and performance. For the better half of a decade, he consumed the most up-to-date scientific research, talked to dozens of leading scientists and clinicians around the world, and visited the country’s best neurology departments—all in the hopes of understanding his mother’s condition.
Now, in Genius Foods, Lugavere presents a comprehensive guide to brain optimization. He uncovers the stunning link between our dietary and lifestyle choices and our brain functions, revealing how the foods you eat directly affect your ability to focus, learn, remember, create, analyze new ideas, and maintain a balanced mood.
Weaving together pioneering research on dementia prevention, cognitive optimization, and nutritional psychiatry, Lugavere distills groundbreaking science into actionable lifestyle changes. He shares invaluable insights into how to improve your brain power, including
- the nutrients that can boost your memory and improve mental clarity (and where to find them);
- the foods and tactics that can energize and rejuvenate your brain, no matter your age;
- a brain-boosting fat-loss method so powerful it has been called “biochemical liposuction”; and
- the foods that can improve your happiness, both now and for the long term.
With Genius Foods, Lugavere offers a cutting-edge yet practical road map to eliminating brain fog and optimizing the brain’s health and performance today—and decades into the future.
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I found this book fascinating because it overturns food concepts that people concerned with healthy eating have followed for decades! The author did tons of research to find out what could have caused his mom’s Alzheimer’s at an early age. What he discovered are the foods that help the brain function optimally. Believe it or not, saturated fats like butter are good for you as long as you don’t combine them with carbs as in pizza. Polyunsaturated fats like canola oil are highly processed and very unhealthy. Most unhealthy of course is sugar. If you are curious and believe that you are what you eat, then read this book.
This book runs along the same lines as THE END OF ALZHEIMER’S, although I think GENIUS FOODS is easier to read and offers options that are easier to adopt (and less expensive and time consuming than Dr. Bredesen’s protocol). Overall, it’s less scientific in its explanation of foods you can eat and lifestyle choices you can make to reduce the possibility of cognitive decline. (There are still plenty of medical explanations though, don’t get me wrong!) I found GENIUS FOODS interesting and learned some new things that I will try to work into my life to lower my risk of developing dementia. One interesting new thing I learned is a list of certain over-the-counter medications that have been linked to higher risk of dementia, including the allergy drug Flucticasone which I use. Guess I’m on the search now to find a safer replacement, but I appreciate knowing the risk. I recommend this book to anyone with a higher likelihood of developing dementia if you’re looking for ways to guard your cognition through lifestyle modifications.
Max is a genius
I spend a lot of time in neurology world these days. My son has more neuro-related diagnoses than I have fingers (yes, literally), and we are always looking for anything can make his – and our – life even a little better.
What Max Lugavere and Paul Grewal provide in Genius Foods is a clear and concise guide to how different foods affect the brain and how to maximize diet for the best neurological outcomes. They basically start with the ketogenic diet (a bear of a regimen, and I bow down to those with medication-resistant disorders for whom it’s the only way of managing seizures, for example), and then build it into a more manageable plan that most anyone can aspire to. It is, admittedly, aspirational: even with my son’s conditions, I don’t see us ever going full-on Genius Plan, and we’re more highly motivated than most in this area.
That said, there are plenty of key takeaways that make this a valuable read for anyone looking to improve brain health. The first and most obvious are to minimize sugar and carbohydrates. Beyond that, we should all be eating more avocados, eggs, olive oil (extra virgin, please), and coconut (oil and fruit) than we are. The coconut oil test, the results of which were published in a medical journal, were particularly impressive. You better believe my little mister is going to be getting a daily helping of coconut oil from now on. (I mixed it into his oatmeal this morning…like I said, we’re not ever going to be exclusive Genius Plan people.)
Genius Foods is also a good reminder of the things that are food and the things that we pretend are food. In that sense, it’s a cross between The Food of a Younger Land and Salt, Sugar, Fat. As with those, I dare you to read this and not make any changes to your diet.
(This review was originally published at: https://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2018/07/genius-foods-become-smarter-happier-and.html)
This book is packed with up to date nutritional information backed by medical facts. It is readable yet informative. It has helped me make changes to my nutritional choices.
Great situational advice, tells you how to change your outlook