Knowledge Base > Barton Seaver - Foods for Brain Health

Foods for Brain Health

Barton Seaver - Foods for Brain Health

This event was on Tuesday, April 11, 2023 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern

Join us for an exciting live event with acclaimed chef and sustainability expert, Barton Seaver, as he shares his expertise on the powerful connection between food and brain health. … Read More.

Recorded

Question:

Please give us a general comment on cooking with sugar and its impact on alzheimers. Guidelines?

— Ken Johnston

Answer:

Sugar is just across the board bad for every part of our body. It's not optimal for every part of our body except for maybe our mouths. Why? Because our mouths love it, right? Yeah because it's delicious and evolutionary. There's a reason for this which is that when we were hunter-gatherers sugar sweet foods are the easiest and most quickest source of calories. And so well, we were kind of trained to fall in love with them. Right and also fruits sweet things tend to try to attract us why because fruits evolutionary reproduction model is that we eat them and then we take those seeds in our body elsewhere. And deposit them, right so fruit wants us to eat it sweet things want us to eat it in our bodies have grown accustomed to that. After that, though sugar is really just not great for guts for our immune system. It leads to a cycle of inflammation and oxidative stress and blood sugar issues. So all the way around sugar is just not a great thing in our diet. A wonderful thing though is that it's really quite easy to kind of train ourselves away from those sugar Cravings or really that omnipresent aspect of sugar in the modern American diet. I think a lot of people would be absolutely shocked if they understood how much sugar we eat in this country. I mean, it's it's over 150 pounds, I think of sugar per person per year, which is just astounding so a general overview though is that fiber is the sort of antidote if you will it just learned this last week in a class from one of my Other faculty members so fiber really is the antidote to Sugar why because fibers slows down the digestive process. It is the cellulose tissues and fiber just slows down the digestive process making those sugars. Well hit the bloodstream slower, right? And so you don't have those spikes plus you have the associated vitamins minerals and nutrients that go along with them in Whole Foods. So fiber is very important there how it relates specifically to alzheimer's again. I do not necessarily know but that oxidative stress as well as the inflammation that sugar helps to cause in the body are certainly not good for our brains and certainly do lead to less than optimal out Health outcomes. So again, what's really great for our hearts is good for our brains and across the board. We know that eating a diet rich in Le trains whole grains Seafood is very good for us for both our neuro-protective benefits that those foods provide but also our neurodegenerative benefits that they provide helping us to create new cells new connections, so There you go from Marcy J.
Barton Seaver

Barton Seaver

Chef, Educator, Author

bartonseaver.com