Eating a high-carbohydrate diet may increase the risk of degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and dementia, as well as other conditions including depression and ADHD.
The rise in blood sugar caused by consuming carbohydrates may compromise brain health, according to Dr. David Perlmutter, neurologist and editor-in-chief of Brain and Gut journal.
To reduce risk of the such conditions and improve brain health, Dr Perlmutter recommends a low-carb, high-fat, gluten-free diet.
“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," he says in an interview published on Alternative and Complementary Therapies.
"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.”
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Dr. Perlmutter says that the modern diet has evolved in a way that cannot be fully supported by our genetic make-up.
"For 99.5% of our time on this planet, we did not eat much in the way of grains. We were eating a gluten-free and low-carbohydrate/high-fat diet, and that is the environment in which our genome perfected itself," he says.
"We are still interacting with that same genome that wants to express perfect health but cannot do so because we are challenging our genome with bizarre epigenetic signals of a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet and a diet that contains potentially threatening proteins, such as gluten and wheat-germ agglutinin, for example."
Brain and Gut journal, which debuts in summer 2014, will focus on exploring the intimate relationship between the brain and the digestive systems, and the effect this interaction has on wider health issues.
Dr. Perlmutter will also explore how brain health and cognitive function are linked to nutrition in his presentation, “The Care and Feeding of Your Brain,” to be delivered at the 2014 Integrative Healthcare Symposium taking place now in New York City.