Your Big Fat Healthy Brain

Here’s a Big Fat Healthy Brain Tip: Increase Omega-3 fatty acids – more fish oils.

Your brain is the body’s fattiest organ – 60 percent of it is made up of lipids (fatlike substances). The kinds of fats differ greatly, and the profusion or scarcity of them greatly determines the architecture of your brain cells. Fats determine how many dendrites and synapses you will have available for intelligence, learning, memory, attention, concentration and your mood.

A low fat diet is good, as long as you get a healthy dose of omega-3 fats for your brain. These are also the kinds of fats that are good for your heart.

Fat molecules help determine how much of which type of neurotransmitters that brain cells will make and release – thus signaling the genes and hormones that make you feel good or bad or harm or benefit your brain.

Unless you get the right kinds of fats in the right amounts, your brain can breakdown. Your cerebral tissue may become starved. When that happens the outer membranes of your cells stiffen and shrivel. The dendrites, or long tentacles that reach out to communicate with other cells may become stunted. The rich chemical flood of neurotransmitters may dry up or become short-circuited, unable to gain entry to neurons and carry messages from neuron to neuron.

The major villain in our diets is saturated fat. It causes major detrimental effects on memory and learning.

On the other hand, mono-unsaturated fat (olive oil) may be beneficial to memory. Polyunsaturated fat may be detrimental or beneficial, depending on the type. The more saturated fats animals eat, the more severe their brain and memory malfunction.

So all fat is not bad. Without getting a degree in chemistry, you can learn which ones are good, which to avoid.

Comments

[Best weight loss supplements]

Do you think that this is a contributing factor to signs of aging with the brain? Alzheimers, even? Not getting the proper fatty nutrients you need over the long term?

[Acai berry]

Thanks for the information... its really educative... would have not known about this, but thanks to your post...

[Todd]

Saturated fat is a villian? Sorry, but saturated fat gives your cells their structure. Mono and ply unsaturated fats give your cells their plyability. Together you need a balance of Saturated, mono and polyunsaturated fats. And in my opinion, the source is important too. Fats from meat need to be free roaming for poultry, grass fed for beef and wild for fish.

With fat, there's is but one villian....Trans fats. Hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils. Figures, it's the one man made fat. Let's also not forget that less than 10 years ago, they were telling us the ALA fats in avocados and nuts were bad for us...now we know otherwise.

As for the rest of our diets, the villian is anything processed. Particularly sugars.

from regular white table sugar, to high fructose corn syrup, turbinado and even agave nectar. Humans were meant to have sugar in the confines of their original containers....Fruit!!!

But underlying all that, diet must be in balance too.

We should eat mostly a plant based diet. Eat organic whenever possible. Eat meats from naturally raised sources, and not too much of them.