Book Review: Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind, by G. Ede, MD

Ede, G. (2024). Change your diet, change your mind: A powerful plan to improve mood, overcome anxiety, and protect memory for a lifetime of optimal mental health. New York: Balance Hachette Book Group.

Summary

The author, Dr. Ede, states that her goal in writing this book was to “take the confusion out of nutrition and replace it with science, simplicity, and common sense; to teach you how to think for yourself about food so you can make your own informed choices and find what works best for you and your family” (pp. 6-7).

There are four parts to the book. In part 1: Rethinking Brain Food, discover the causes of mental health problems, failures of current nutrition guidelines, how the brain functions, and defining a brain-healthy diet. Part 2: Our Descent into Dietary Madness chapters cover processed foods, metabolic mayhem, insulin resistance, and the promise of ketogenic diets. In part 3: The Whole Truth about Whole Foods, the benefits and risks of different food groups and how they affect the brain are identified. Part 4: Hope is on the Menu takes the information from previous parts and presents three dietary strategies that you can customize based on your goals, conditions, and preferences.

The plans in the book are intended as short-term, six to 12-week strategies toward better metabolic health. You can then work with your health care provider(s) to further personalize and tweak them.

Brain Healthy Diet

A brain-healthy diet must meet the following criteria:

1.       Nourish the brain with adequate essential nutrients

2.       Protect the brain by excluding damaging ingredients

3.       Energize the brain by keeping blood sugar and insulin levels in a healthy range

Advantages

The book is comprehensive and well-researched. Key terms and concepts are noted in bold font with relatable case stories of success. The tour of the brain’s anatomy is informative and makes it easier to understand what it needs. The quiet diet strategies are prescriptive with details (e.g., meal plans, recipes) and instructions for implementation. There is a helpful section on handling challenges and obstacles, such as social gatherings, restaurants, traveling, and cheat days.

Disadvantages

The deeper dives into brain metabolism may be too technical for some readers. Molecules, pathways, and systems are described via six concepts. You may want to skim over, read twice, or save for another time.

Highlights

·       Page 19, “Optimal mental health requires that your whole brain be made of the right stuff, so if you have a mental (or physical) health problem of any kind, the first place to look isn’t your medicine cabinet, it’s your pantry…the way we eat has a profound impact on brain development, neurotransmitters, stress hormones, inflammation, antioxidant capacity, brain energy production, brain aging, and brain healing.”

·       Page 24, “Diets too high in refined carbohydrates like sugar, flour, fruit juice, and cereal products promote the persistently high insulin levels that lead to insulin resistance…High blood glucose and insulin levels are a deadly one-two punch for the brain. Repeatedly flooding the brain with too much glucose triggers unrelenting waves of inflammation and oxidative stress, damaging your brain’s delicate architecture and overwhelming its mitochondria—the tiny engines inside your cells that work tirelessly to turn glucose into energy. Repeatedly bombarding the brain with too much insulin can lead to insulin resistance, which makes it increasingly difficult for insulin to enter the brain where it is needed to help turn that glucose into energy.”

·       Page 27, Quiet Diet Approach: Quiet Paleo, Quiet Keto, and Quiet Carnivore

·       Page 31, Hierarchy of Evidence

·       Page 46, “Most journalists, clinicians, and lawmakers do not understand the serious shortcomings of nutrition epidemiology, so its unsubstantiated ideas become amplified in media headlines as implicit fact, incorporated into dietary guidelines as policy, and implanted into our collective psyche as gospel.

·       Page 55, Neurotransmitters, role in the brain, medication examples

·       Page 64: “…if you eat more carbohydrates than you can burn right away or store as starch, your liver will turn it into saturated fat, not unsaturated fat, because saturated fat is the most compact and practical way to store energy. It stands to reason that if saturated fat were inherently bad for us, the body wouldn’t be designed to do this.”

·       Page 68, “Cholesterol is too big and bulky to enter the brain across the blood-brain barrier, so not a single molecule of your brain’s cholesterol comes from the cholesterol in your food. Instead, the brain makes all of its own cholesterol on-site, from scratch.”

·       Page 69, the Brain-healthy ingredient list includes protein, DHA, arachidonic acid, vitamins B1, B6, B9, B12, iron, choline, copper, sodium, potassium, and chloride.

·       Page 71, “The most powerful driver of insulin production is rising blood glucose, and the most powerful driver of rising blood glucose is dietary carbohydrate (sugars and starches)—with refined carbohydrates such as sugar, fruit juice, and processed grain products (flour, white rice, instant oats, breakfast cereals, etc.) demanding the greatest amount of insulin. (Remember, starch is just lots of glucose molecules linked together, so foods don’t have to be sweet to raise your blood glucose.)”

·       Page 105, “The single most important change you can make to your diet to protect your brain from damaging inflammation and oxidative stress is to avoid refined carbohydrates and vegetable oils, which starts with eliminating ultra-processed foods.”

·       Page 160, “Ketogenic diets support and stabilize brain metabolism with ketones, allowing the brain to operate more cleanly, smoothly, and efficiently…the nutritional quality of your diet matters, too.”

·       Page 168, “Meat contains all the nutrients we need, in their most bioavailable forms, without interference from antinutrients.”

·       Page 200, “If you have never tried a dairy-free experiment, I encourage you to set aside all dairy products for thirty days to see how you feel.”

·       Page 209, “The isoflavones in soybeans interfere with thyroid peroxidase, the enzyme your thyroid gland uses to insert iodine into thyroid hormone. The more isoflavones you consume, the more iodine you will need to overcome their anti-thyroid effects.”

·       Page 269, “In the case of true food allergies, even a tiny quantity of food can trigger the body to immediately release a massive amount of histamine—a powerful neurotransmitter that can cause hives, throat swelling, wheezing, and other familiar allergy symptoms that can even be life-threatening in some cases. Food sensitivity symptoms…can take hours to days to appear, and their severity depends on the quantity of food you eat…”

·       Page 314, “From the moment a plant or animal dies, bacteria naturally present in the environment begin breaking down its proteins into histamine and other biogenic amines (protein fragments with biological activity). Histamine…will continue to accumulate in food until you freeze it, boil it, or eat it, so the more ‘aged’ foods are, the more histamine they will contain.”

·       Page 315, “The healthy intestine makes an enzyme that neutralizes histamine, so most people can tolerate reasonable quantities of high-histamine foods.”