Keeping Your Brain Healthy: Brain-FX

More on Fats

Without getting a degree in chemistry, you can learn that saturated fats come from meat, whole milk, butter and cheese. Other brain-busting fats are hydrogenated vegetable oils and trans-fatty acids such as margarine, mayonnaise, and processed food, and omega-6 vegetable oils such as corn, safflower and sunflower oils.

The best fat that is good for your brain is the omega-3 type found in seafood and fatty fish, or taken as a fish oil supplement.

The more years you consistently eat a high animal fat diet, the more severe the risk of loosing your brain power. The danger comes from a long-time pattern of a high saturated fat diet. An occasional hot-fudge sundae splurge is not likely to be detrimental.

A study by Richard Mayeux and colleagues at Columbia University showed that people over age 65 who had diets high in animal fat were 5 times more likely to develop Parkinson’s than those who ate the least animal fat.

Americans typically eat 15 times more potentially brain-destructive type oils than we do brain-building omega-3 fish-type oils.

Fish oils seem to influence mood and behavior by boosting brain levels of the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin. People with low levels of serotonin are depressed and experience mood disorders.

Globally, those people who skimp on fish have the highest incidences of both depression and heart disease. The fat in fish can protect arteries from clogging and prevents heart disease as well.

How much fish oil? An expert recommends at least 650 milligrams a day of long-chain omega-3s. That’s only 1 3/4 ounces of fresh salmon, 3 ½ ounces of tuna, or 1 ½ ounces of canned sardines. Not much really, but of course you have to like fish.  Otherwise, there are plenty of fish oil capsules on the market.

Most of the common brands of fish oil capsules I've seen at the supermarkets, pharmacy and health food stores contain 1000 mg, which means that one a day keeps brain deterioration away.

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.