Summary: Please join us for 3 wonderful talks Friday, April 12, 2019, 8:30 AM to 11:55AM, at Caritas Christi, 129 DePaul Center Rd., Greensburg, PA. I will be speaking about diet, microbiome and the aging brain! Much of my talk will feature key points that I presented at the 2019 Virginia Council of Nurse Practitioner (VCNP) Annual Conference! You’ll learn that the Western Diet is aging the brain FASTER than the Mediterranean Diet, and that the MIND diet, a hybrid diet of the heart healthy Mediterranean Diet, DASH, and aging brain literature, decreases the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease and slows cognitive decline better that its constituent diets. This is information you don’t want to miss! Please join us as ALL of the talks presented April 12th encompass keys to grateful and healthy aging, resilience, and holistic health.
SUMMARY: Our upcoming CE presentation at the 2019 Virginia Council of Nurse Practitioner (VCNP) Annual Conference, March 7th, dives deep into BRAIN, COGNITION, DIET, CE, ALZHEIMER’S! We are going to share what the evidence finds forWHAT TO EAT, and WHAT NOT TO EAT, for BRAIN HEALTH! Our presentation is called “Add 7.5 yrs to Brainspan with MIND diet and SAGE Cognition Assessment Tool”. What you need to know –> A LOT of research is looking at specific diets and brain health. At this time, the MIND diet rises to the top for reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive impairment both with strict and moderate follow. It is this latter finding that makes theMIND diet BETTER than the Mediterranean and DASH diet for brain health because those had NO significant impact on AD risk reduction for moderate follow! ♥–> Diet has incredible systemic reach, including all the way to crossing the blood brain barrier! BAM–>Diet is perhaps the biggest determinant of the microbiome constituents. The major focus of recent research is on the microbiome and its by-products (called metabolites) because those can be changed up by diet and lifestyle. Thus diet can alter the microbiome towards health (anti-inflammatory) or towards being more disease-prone (inflammatory). \o/ If you are a Licensed Nurse Practitioner (in any state), or student enrolled in a NP program, plan to attend this Brain, Cognition, Diet CE! Those unable to attend, or not nurse practitioners, message us for information on how you too can see this presentation! \o/ The bottom line is that everyone needs to hear this information because recent studies find that eating a Western-style diet literally SHRINKS the brain, even in middle age. The results accounted for the effects of all other lifestyle factors, indicating that, when people are in their 40s and 50s,diet exerts a stronger influence on Alzheimer’s disease than exercise or intellectual activity do. “Alzheimer’s doesn’t just turn on when you reach a certain age,”explains Lisa Mosconi, PhD, associate director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian.“Instead, it’s a very long process that starts with changes in the brain when people are in their 40s and 50s. So we have a good 20 years to do something about it. The question is, what can we do in terms of prevention?” This Brain, Cognition, Diet, CE Alzheimer’s information is key to mitigating those risks! ♥
Summary: This is the second of five family fav vegetable redic delic recipes I’m posting –> SCD PALEO Cucumber Salad. The first posted at SCD PALEO Cauliflower Mock Potato Salad! These salads meet all healing diet tenets be it: Mediterranean Diet, Whole Foods, SCD, GAPS, PALEO, AIP… You can add whatever vegetables you want to help meet the target of 30 different vegetables each week to increase microbiome diversity! These salads are also great topped on leafy greens!♥The BIG thing to learn in this post is that cucumbers are high on theEWG Dirty Dozenpesticide residue list (they are listed fifteen) so buy them organic if possible. Regarding the green peel, I recommend you peel cucumbers unless you can confirm there is NO coating, even if the cucumber is organic. I don’t want your gut seeing coatings! To avoid coatings, try growing cucumbers in your garden ⇒ they grow insane in ours! Or source from a farmer you trust! Of course this recipe usesunadulterated EVOO ⇒ those are listed on this UC Davis PDF report. Costco Kirkland Organic or California Ranch are listed as unadulterated on this report. Unadulterated EVOO is a heart AND brain healthy monounsaturated fat. This oil is a predominant ingredient on the Mediterranean Diet and MIND diet! The MIND diet stands for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay. It combines Mediterranean, DASH, AND aging brain literature. Learn a bit more about it here! ♥ It’s the first time I’m posting about it, butcontact meto learn How-Tos, Workshops, or for CME! XO
SUMMARY (updated Aug 2018):Dr. Rob Knight’s talk, Saturday, October 18, 2014, listed eleven factors that optimize the gut microbiome based on the American Gut Data cautioning all is preliminary. These are listed below along with an interesting article =&1=&Can We Eat Our Way To A Healthier Microbiome? It’s Complicated=&2=&” in which Dr. Knight and Jeff Leach (founders of crowd sourcing project“American Gut”) discuss the microbiome diet. A KEY finding was that themore vegs consumed (30 different each week is BEST), the more diverse the microbiome, and that is thought to be associated with health and improved immune status since MANY chronic diseases (see the below Table) have changes in microbiome diversity AND composition, [Cantinean et al 2018]. A 2018 update on the American Gut data just published, [McDonald et al 2018], and it still says to eat 30 different vegs each week!This post also provides insight into what the microbiome experts are saying about translation of microbiome research into clinical practice. And last, my synopsis of Dr. Knight’s talk is provided (see below the light bulb) along with my listing of fav microbiome researcher labs whose work is discussed in this post! Use them and PUBMED for your own disease prevention or mitigation research. Always. Stick with the evidence for answers as this blog does.
Source: [Catinean et al 2018] An overview on the interplay between nutraceuticals and gut microbiota, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5855885/
Table 1, lists links between several diseases and changes of microbiota:
Disease
Changes in microbiota’s diversity and composition
Consequences
Reference
Inflammatory bowel disease
Less bacterial diversity ↓ the number of Bacteroides and Firmicutes
↓Firmicutes↓Faecalibacterium and Anaerosporobacter (order Clostridiales)↑Parabacteroides and Allisonella (order Aeromonadales)
increase in luminal gut ethanol production metabolism of dietary choline release of lipopolysaccharides increasing small intestinal bacterial overgrowth increasing endotoxemia increasing lipopolysaccharide →↑ insulin resistance and ↑ TNF alpha
trimethylamine is formed by gut microbiota from nutrients which contain l-carnitine, choline, phosphatidylcholine followed by the formation of trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) by hepatic enzymes increasing the plasmatic level of TMAO–increasing the risk of myocardial infarction and stroke
Dr. Rob Knight’s eleven point punch list of things that seem to be beneficial to the microbiome are:
Source: Dr. Rob Knight_11 Factors Affect Microbiome from American Gut Data, biomeonboardawareness.com/
Eat lots of plants: 5 to 30 different varieties each week preferably. This finding is so profound that“American Gut” will soon change participant food journal requirements to “only ask forfrequency on consumption of holistic food within the past month, instead of the three week food journal. This change is warranted since the long term diet, especially meat and fiber consumption, has been shown to have the largest effect on the microbiome.”
Aging increases microbiome diversity: Microbiomes are more diverse at age 50 to 60 then populations in their twenties (see above slides).
Having an IBD diagnosis means your microbiome is altered. NOTE: Many chronic and autoimmune diseases are also following suit.
The time of year alters the microbiome with a more diverse microbiome being with sun and outdoor exposure.
Antibiotics wipe the microbiome with some folks recovering relatively soon whereas others do not recover the pre-antibiotic microbiome even one year later.
Males vs females: The sex for a given microbiome can now be accurately predicted.
Sleep 8 hours for a more diverse microbiome. Less than 6 hours yields a less diverse microbiome.
BMIbut it only subtly affects the microbiome.
Plants: eating 6 to 10 each week is good, but eating 30 plus different varieties is best. (See further discussion below.)
Alcohol: one drink is helpful, more than one reduces diversity.
Frequent exercisers have a more diverse microbiome and it is best if exercise is outdoors rather than indoors.
What’s up with plants and the microbiome?
Here is a great read where Dr. Knight and Jeff Leach talk about plants (and their fiber):Can We Eat Our Way To A Healthier Microbiome? It’s Complicated. In sum, “eating too little fiber could starve the bacteria we want around. “When we starve our bacteria they eat us,” Leach says. “They eat the mucus lining – the mucin in our large intestine.” Knight adds that when we do keep our bacteria well fed, they, in turn, give off nutrients that nourish the cells that line our guts. Fiber, Knight says, “is thought to be good for your gut health over all.” You can read the post, Fiber Additives Starve Gut Microbes. They Eat Mucus Lining for more on all that! Bottom line: Harness this information to positively nudge your microbiome towards health. Note too that everyone is uniquely different so the right diet depends a lot on the individual’s lifestyle AND that individual’s microbes. More tips from the article are:
There are a lot of different ways to get fiber. Leach recommends getting it from vegetables. Eat a variety of veggies, and eat the whole thing, he recommends. “If you’re going to eat asparagus, eat the whole plant, not just the tips,” he says.
Fiber was also central to Leach’s suggestion to Stein to eat more garlic and leek. Those vegetables contain high levels of a type of fiber called inulin, which feeds actinobacteria in our guts. In fact, inulin is considered a prebiotic, since it feeds the good bacteria, or probiotics, that live inside us.
Garlic actually has antimicrobial properties, which paradoxically, could also be good thing for our microbiomes.One studyshows that garlic hurts some of the bad bacteria in our guts while leaving the good guys intact. [Filocamo et al 2012]
Eat fermented foods which contain probiotics along with foods that feed those probiotics. Fermented foods like kimchi, sauerkraut and yogurt might be surer sources of probiotics. Researchers are unclear about whether these have any lasting effect on the composition of our microbiome, but in some cases they do seem to help. “Epidemiologically there seems to be some evidence that eating fermented food is beneficial rather than harmful,” Knight says. But researchers are still trying to figure out why.
⇒ A key benefit of fiber beyond regularity, is that when the microbiome ferments it, short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) are produced.
This study, from Nutrition & Diabetes, summarizes SCFA nicely: “Colonic fermentation is a complex process that occurs through the interactions of many microbial species and involves the anaerobic breakdown of dietary fibre, protein and peptides.1, 2, 3The principal end products of colonic fermentation are the short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) acetate, propionate and butyrate, the gases hydrogen, carbon dioxide and methane4, 5, 6and energy, which is used by the microbiota for growth and maintenance of cellular functions.7Small amounts of branched chain fatty acids (iso-butyrate, valerate and iso-valerate) are also formed from protein and amino acid degradation. The amount and type of dietary fibre are among the major determinants of gut microbial composition and SCFA production patterns.8In humans, the SCFA produced account for 5–10% of total dietary energy.9) [Fernandes et al 2014]
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