Even small increases in blood sugar caused by a diet high in carbohydrates can be detrimental to brain health, says an alternative medicine guru. Some recent claims link carbohydrate calorie-rich diets to a greater risk for brain shrinkage, dementia and Alzheimer's disease, impaired cognition, and other disorders. David Perlmutter, MD, best-selling author of Grain Brain, makes this claim in a Alternative and Complementary Therapies interview.
Perlmutter is a board-certified neurologist and fellow of the American College of Nutrition and has just been appointed Editor-in-Chief of a new peer-reviewed journal, Brain and Gut, that will debut in summer 2014 and publish research dedicated to exploring a whole systems approach to health and disease from the intimate relationship between the brain and the digestive systems - just what he wrote hos book on.
In the interview "Rethinking Dietary Approaches for Brain Health," Dr. Perlmutter says, "We live with this notion that a calorie is a calorie, but at least in terms of brain health, and I believe for the rest of the body as well, there are very big differences between our sources of calories in terms of the impact on our health. Carbohydrate calories, which elevate blood glucose, are dramatically more detrimental to human physiology, and specifically to human health, than are calories derived from healthful sources of fat."