How to Feed Your Brain: Seven Evolutionary Steps to Transform your Mental Health

How To Feed Your Brain is a guide to eating the most nutritious, brain-friendly foods available, to maximise brain function throughout each stage of life, starting in the womb.
It’s also about avoiding brain disorders. From anxiety to Alzheimer’s, discover the way that food influences your mental wellbeing.
This book is about the key brain nutrients, those that fuel the brain, give it structure and make it work. It’s also about how deficiency of those key nutrients can affect cognitive function, and how to spot the signs that something in the diet is lacking.
Discover how your brain’s dependency on specific nutrients was determined hundreds of thousands of years ago. That dependency remains exactly the same today. You’d be surprised how little you’ve changed over the years.
How to Feed Your Brain is divided into three parts. In part one, I outline seven crucial steps to maximise mental health and avoid mental ill-health, with a particular focus on the more common brain disorders: ADHD, autism, depression and anxiety, psychosis and dementia. You will learn what to eat, and what not to eat, and how the gut microbiome, intermittent fasting and exercise also play a role in mental health. Learn also learn about the specific needs of children and adults, including the elderly.
Part two provides the backstory, a brief race through time and place that explains how our species-specific diet was determined. It’s a fascinating story, one that links the past with the present and makes sense of the cause-and-effect relationship between nutrition and mental health. Discover how we became the smartest animals on the planet, with the biggest brains – and how those brains are now shrinking at an alarming rate.
The brain reaches its full size by six or seven years of age, but it takes at least another twelve years to develop fully. No other animal devotes so much time and energy into producing an adult brain. It is so complex and advanced that its full potential cannot be achieved when there is malnutrition, toxicity, or deficiency of specific nutrients.
Part three provides simple meal suggestions to help ensure your diet contains all the key brain nutrients and more. You don’t need to move to a tropical rainforest or grassy savannah to find foods that mimic your ancestral diet and maximise your brain’s potential.
This book is for anyone keen to maintain healthy brain function and avoid dementia and cognitive decline in later life. It is also ideal for those who are struggling with mental health issues and who wish to explore dietary solutions. People caring for others with mental health problems will also find it a useful resource.
This is a science book, fully referenced, but written in a style that makes it accessible to the layperson. It is not meant to be a science course. Each section ends with a summary and practical tips, so you don’t feel you have to memorise everything. (Some of you may be struggling with poor memory, after all.)
Everything is connected, and it is this interrelation that reminds us of our place within the natural world. Nothing exemplifies this more than the effect of food on the brain.
Our dependence on the natural world for our sustenance has not changed just because our diets have. We can regain our mental health, but first we must eat like humans.