Sky Falling, Film at 11: ‘What Grain Is Doing to Your Brain’
26th November 2013
It’s tempting to call David Perlmutter’s dietary advice radical. The neurologist and president of the Perlmutter Health Center in Naples, Fla., believes all carbs, including highly touted whole grains, are devastating to our brains. He claims we must make major changes in our eating habits as a society to ward off terrifying increases in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia rates.
Actually, it’s tempting to call it just the latest fad food scare.
And yet Perlmutter argues that his recommendations are not radical at all. In fact, he says, his suggested menu adheres more closely to the way mankind has eaten for most of human history.
And, of course, we’re still living the way we have lived for most of human history. Makes perfect sense, it does.
What’s deviant, he insists, is our modern diet. Dementia, chronic headaches, depression, epilepsy and other contemporary scourges are not in our genes, he claims. “It’s in the food you eat,” Perlmutter writes in his bestselling new book, Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar – Your Brain’s Silent Killers. “The origin of brain disease is in many cases predominantly dietary.”
And, of course, he’s got a book to flog, with a title ripped from the headlines in [insert supermarket tabloid name of your choice]. It’s what the fad food scare people do.
November 26th, 2013 at 11:09
If you talk to the people who believe these pop-experts, it’s amazing how they firmly believe that there was no dementia, chronic headaches, depression, epilepsy, etc. until the late 20th century. Selling self-help books to these rubes is the new version of selling them the Brooklyn Bridge.