Do Try This At Home: The 12-Week Brain Fitness Program

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12 Weeks To Measurably Boost Your Brain

This is Dr. Majid Fotuhi. From humble beginnings (being smuggled out of Iran in 1980 to avoid death in the war), he went on (after teaching himself English, French, and German, hedging his bets as he didn’t know for sure where life would lead him) to get his MD from Harvard Medical School and his PhD in neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University. Since then, he’s had a decades-long illustrious career in neurology and neurophysiology.

What does he want us to know?

The Brain Fitness Program

This is not, by the way, something he’s selling. Rather, it was a landmark 12-week study in which 127 people aged 60–80, of which 63% female, all with a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment, underwent an interventional trial—in other words, a 12-week brain fitness course.

After it, 84% of the participants showed statistically significant improvements in cognitive function.

Not only that, but of those who underwent MRI testing before and after (not possible for everyone due to practical limitations), 71% showed either no further deterioration of the hippocampus, or actual growth above the baseline volume of the hippocampus (that’s good, and it means functionally the memory center of the brain has been rejuvenated).

You can read a little more about the study here:

A Personalized 12-week “Brain Fitness Program” for Improving Cognitive Function and Increasing the Volume of Hippocampus in Elderly with Mild Cognitive Impairment

As for what the program consisted of, and what Dr. Fotuhi thus recommends for everyone…

Cognitive stimulation

This is critical, so we’re going to spend most time on this one—the others we can give just a quick note and a pointer.

In the study this came in several forms and had the benefit of neurofeedback technology, but he says we can replicate most of the effects by simply doing something cognitively stimulating. Whatever challenges your brain is good, but for maximum effect, it should involve the language faculties of the brain, since these are what tend to get hit most by age-related cognitive decline, and are also what tends to have the biggest impact on life when lost.

If you lose your keys, that’s an inconvenience, but if you can’t communicate what is distressing you, or understand what someone is explaining to you, that’s many times worse—and that kind of thing is a common reality for many people with dementia.

To keep the lights brightly lit in that part of the brain: language-learning is good, at whatever level suits you personally. In other words: there’s a difference between entry-level Duolingo Spanish, and critically analysing Rumi’s poetry in the original Persian, so go with whatever is challenging and/but accessible for you—just like you wouldn’t go to the gym for the first time and try to deadlift 500lbs, but you also probably wouldn’t do curls with the same 1lb weights every day for 10 years.

In other words: progressive overloading is key, for the brain as well as for muscles. Start easy, but if you’re breezing through everything, it’s time to step it up.

If for some reason you’re really set against the idea of learning another language, though, check out:

Reading As A Cognitive Exercise ← there are specific tips here for ensuring your reading is (and remains) cognitively beneficial

Mediterranean diet

Shocking nobody, this is once again recommended. You might like to check out the brain-healthy “MIND” tweak to it, here:

Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet ← it’s the fourth one

Omega-3 supplementation

Nothing complicated here. The brain needs a healthy balance of these fatty acids to function properly, and most people have an incorrect balance (too little omega-3 for the omega-6 present):

What Omega-3 Fatty Acids Really Do For Us ← scroll to “against cognitive decline”

Increasing fitness

There’s a good rule of thumb: what’s healthy for your heart, is healthy for your brain. This is because, like every other organ in your body, the brain does not function well without good circulation bringing plenty of oxygen and nutrients, which means good cardiovascular health is necessary. The brain is extra sensitive to this because it’s a demanding organ in terms of how much stuff it needs delivering via blood, and also because of the (necessary; we’d die quickly and horribly without it) impediment of the blood-brain barrier, and the possibility of beta-amyloid plaques and similar woes (they will build up if circulation isn’t good).

How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk ← number two on the list here

Practising mindfulness medication

This is also straightforward, but not to be underestimated or skipped over:

No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

Want to step it up? Check out:

Meditation Games That You’ll Actually Enjoy

Lastly…

Dr. Fotuhi wants us to consider looking after our brain the same way we look after our teeth. No, he doesn’t want us to brush our brain, but he does want us to take small measurable actions multiple times per day, every day.

You can’t just spend the day doing nothing but brushing your teeth for the entirety of January the 1st and then expect them to be healthy for the rest of the year; it doesn’t work like that—and it doesn’t work like that for the brain, either.

So, make the habits, and keep them going

Take care!

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  • You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers!

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    From Cucumbers To Kindles

    Q: Where do I get cucumber extract?

    A: You can buy it from BulkSupplements.com (who, despite their name, start at 100g packs)

    Alternatively: you want it as a topical ointment (for skin health) rather than as a dietary supplement (for bone and joint health), you can extract it yourself! No, it’s not “just juice cucumbers”, but it’s also not too tricky.

    Click Here For A Quick How-To Guide!

    Q: Tips for reading more and managing time for it?

    A: We talked about this a little bit in yesterday’s edition, so you may have seen that, but aside from that:

    • If you don’t already have one, consider getting a Kindle or similar e-reader. They’re very convenient, and also very light and ergonomicno more wrist strain as can occur with physical books. No more eye-strain, either!
    • Consider making reading a specific part of your daily routine. A chapter before bed can be a nice wind-down, for instance! What’s important is it’s a part of your day that’ll always, or at least almost always, allow you to do a little reading.
    • If you drive, walk, run, or similar each day, a lot of people find that’s a great time to listen to an audiobook. Please be safe, though!
    • If your lifestyle permits such, a “reading retreat” can be a wonderful vacation! Even if you only “retreat” to your bedroom, the point is that it’s a weekend (or more!) that you block off from all other commitments, and curl up with the book(s) of your choice.

    Q: Any study tips as we approach exam season? A lot of the productivity stuff is based on working life, but I can’t be the only student!

    A: We’ve got you covered:

    • Be passionate about your subject! We know of no greater study tip than that.
    • Find a willing person and lecture them on your subject. When one teaches, two learn!
    • Your mileage may vary depending on your subject, but, find a way of studying that’s fun to you!
    • If you can get past papers, get as many as you can, and use those as your “last minute” studying in the week before your exam(s). This will prime you for answering exam-style questions (and leverage state-dependent memory). As a bonus, it’ll also help ease any anxiety, because by the time of your exam it’ll be “same old, same old”!

    Q: Energy drinks for biohacking, yea or nay?

    A: This is definitely one of those “the dose makes the poison” things!

    But… The generally agreed safe dose of taurine is around 3g/day for most people; a standard Red Bull contains 1g.

    That math would be simple, but… if you eat meat (including poultry or fish), that can also contain 10–950mg per 100g. For example, tuna is at the high end of that scale, with a standard 12oz (340g) tin already containing up to 3.23g of taurine!

    And sweetened carbonated beverages in general have so many health issues that it’d take us a full article to cover them.

    Short version? Enjoy in moderation if you must, but there are definitely better ways of getting the benefits they may offer.

    Q: Best morning routine?

    A: The best morning routine is whatever makes you feel most ready to take on your day!

    This one’s going to vary a lot—one person’s morning run could be another person’s morning coffee and newspaper, for example.

    In a nutshell, though, ask yourself these questions:

    • How long does it take me to fully wake up in the morning, and what helps or hinders that?
    • When I get out of bed, what do I really need before I can take on my day?
    • If I could have the perfect morning, what would it look like?
    • What can evening me do, to look after morning me’s best interests? (Semi-prepare breakfast ready? Lay out clothes ready? Running shoes? To-Do list?)

    Q: I’m curious how much of these things you actually use yourselves, and are there any disagreements in the team? In a lot of places things can get pretty heated when it’s paleo vs vegan / health benefits of tea/coffee vs caffeine-abstainers / you need this much sleep vs rise and grinders, etc?

    A: We are indeed genuinely enthusiastic about health and productivity, and that definitely includes our own! We may or may not all do everything, but between us, we probably have it all covered. As for disagreements, we’ve not done a survey, but if you take an evidence-based approach, any conflict will tend to be minimized. Plus, sometimes you can have the best of both!

    • You could have a vegan paleo diet (you’d better love coconut if you do, though!
    • There is decaffeinated coffee and tea (your taste may vary)
    • You can get plenty of sleep and rise early (so long as an “early to bed, early to rise” schedule suits you!)

    Interesting note: humans are social creatures on an evolutionary level. Evolution has resulted in half of us being “night owls” and the other half “morning larks”, the better to keep each other safe while sleeping. Alas, modern life doesn’t always allow us to have the sleep schedule that’d suit each of us best individually!

    Have a question you’d like answered? Reply to this email, or use the feedback widget at the bottom! We always love to hear from you

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  • Calm Your Inflammation – by Dr. Brenda Tidwell

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    The advice in the book is not just dietary, and covers lifestyle interventions too, including exercise etc—and how to strike the right balance, since the wrong kind of exercise or too much of it can sabotage our efforts. Similarly, Dr. Tidwell doesn’t just say such things as “manage stress” but also provides 10 ways of doing so, and so forth for other vectors of inflammation-control. She does cover dietary things as well though, including supplements where applicable, and the role of gut health, sleep, and other factors.

    The style of the book is quite entry-level pop-science, designed to be readable and comprehensible to all, without unduly dumbing-down. In terms of hard science or jargon, there are 6 pages of bibliography and 3 pages of glossary, so it’s neither devoid of such nor overwhelmed by it.

    Bottom line: if fighting inflammation is a priority for you, then this book is an excellent primer.

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  • The Twenty-Four Hour Mind – by Dr. Rosalind Cartwright

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    We’ve reviewed books about sleep before, and even about dreaming, so what does this one have to offer that’s new?

    Quite a lot, actually! Before Dr. Cartwright, there were mainly two models of sleep and dreaming:

    • The “top-down” model of psychoanalysts: our minds shape our dreams which in turn reveal things about us as people
    • The “bottom-up” model of neuroscientists: our brains need to go through regular maintaince cycles, of which vivid hallucinations are a quirky side-effect.

    And now, as Dr. Cartwright puts it:

    ❝I will lay out a new [horizontal] psychological model of the twenty-four hour mind; that is, how the predominantly conscious (waking) and unconscious (sleeping) forms of mental behavior interact through the brain’s regular, but differently organized, states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming.❞

    This she does in the exploratory style of a 224-page lecture, which sounds like it might be tedious, but is actually attention-grabbing and engaging throughout. This book is more of a page-turner than soporific bedtime reading!

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    Click here to check out The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, and learn more about yours!

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    The Science of Hunger, And How To Sate It

    This is Dr. David Ludwig. That’s not a typo; he’s a doctor both ways—MD and PhD.

    Henceforth we’ll just say “Dr. Ludwig”, though! He’s a professor in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center.

    His research focuses on the effects of diet on hormones, metabolism, and body weight, and he’s one of the foremost experts when it comes to carbohydrates, glycemic load, and obesity.

    Why are we putting on weight? What are we getting wrong?

    Contrary to popular belief, Dr. Ludwig says, weight gain is not caused by a lack of exercise. In fact, people tend to overestimate how many calories are burned by exercise.

    A spoonful of sugar may make the medicine go down, but it also contains 60 calories, and that’d take about 1,500 steps for the average person to burn off. Let’s put this another way:

    If you walk 10,000 steps per day, that will burn off 400 calories. Still think you can exercise away that ice cream sundae or plate of fries?

    Wait, this is interesting and all, but what does this have to do with hunger?

    Why we get hungry

    Two important things:

    • All that exercise makes us hungry, because the more we exercise, the more the body speeds up our metabolism accordingly.
    • Empty calories don’t just add weight themselves, they also make us hungrier

    What are empty calories, and why do they make us hungrier?

    Empty calories are calories that are relatively devoid of other nutrition. This especially means simple sugars (especially refined sugar), white flour and white flour products (quick-release starches), and processed seed oils (e.g. canola, sunflower, and friends).

    They zip straight into our bloodstream, and our body sends out an army of insulin to deal with the blood sugar spike. And… that backfires.

    Imagine a person whose house is a terrible mess, and they have a date coming over in half an hour.

    They’re going to zoom around tidying, but they’re going to stuff things out of sight as quickly and easily as possible, rather than, say, sit down and Marie Kondo the place.

    But superficially, they got the job done really quickly!

    Insulin does similarly when overwhelmed by a blood sugar spike like that.

    So, it stores everything as fat as quickly as possible, and whew, the pancreas needs a break now after all that exertion, and the blood is nice and free from blood sugars.

    Wait, the blood is what now?

    The body notices the low blood sugar levels, and it also knows you just stored fat so you must be preparing for starvation, and now the low blood sugar levels indicate starvation is upon us. Quick, we must find food if we want to survive! So it sends a hunger signal to make sure you don’t let the body starve.

    You make a quick snack, and the cycle repeats.

    Dr. Ludwig’s solution:

    First, we need to break out of that cycle, and that includes calming down our insulin response (and thus rebuilding our insulin sensitivity, as our bodies will have become desensitized, after the equivalent of an air-raid siren every 40 minutes or so).

    How to do that?

    First, cut out the really bad things that we mentioned above.

    Next: cut healthy carbs too—we’re talking unprocessed grains here, legumes as well, and also starchy vegetables (root vegetables etc). Don’t worry, this will be just for a short while.

    The trick here is that we are resensitizing our bodies to insulin.

    Keep this up for even just a week, and then gradually reintroduce the healthier carbs. Unprocessed grains are better than root vegetables, as are legumes.

    You’re not going to reintroduce the sugars, white flour, canola oil, etc. You don’t have to be a puritan, and if you go to a restaurant you won’t undo all your work if you have a small portion of fries. But it’s not going to be a part of your general diet.

    Other tips from Dr. Ludwig:

    • Get plenty of high-quality protein—it’s good for you and suppresses your appetite
    • Shop for success—make sure you keep your kitchen stocked with healthy easy snack food
    • Nuts, cacao nibs, and healthy seeds will be your best friends and allies here
    • Make things easy—buy pre-chopped vegetables, for example, so when you’re hungry, you don’t have to wait longer (and work more) to eat something healthy
    • Do what you can to reduce stress, and also eat mindfully (that means paying attention to each mouthful, rather than wolfing something down while multitasking)

    If you’d like to know more about Dr. Ludwig and his work, you can check out his website for coaching, recipes, meal plans, his blog, and other resources!

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    It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

    Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!

    In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

    As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

    So, no question/request too big or small

    ❝So, I have a topic that I’d love you guys to discuss: green tea. I used to try + drink it years ago but I always got an allergic reaction to it. So the question I’d like answered is: Will I still get the same allergic reaction if I take the capsules ? Also, because it’s caffeinated, will taking it interfere with iron pills, other vitamins + meds ? I read that the health benefits of the decaffeinated tea/capsules are not as great as the caffeinated. Any info would be greatly appreciated !! Thanks much !!❞

    I’ll answer this one in the first person as I’ve had a similar issue:

    I found long ago that taking any kind of tea (not herbal infusions, but true teas, e.g. green tea, black tea, red tea, etc) on an empty stomach made me want to throw up. The feeling would subside within about half an hour, but I learned it was far better to circumvent it by just not taking tea on an empty stomach.

    However! I take an l-theanine supplement when I wake up, to complement my morning coffee, and have never had a problem with that. Of course, my physiology is not your physiology, and this “shouldn’t” be happening to either of us in the first place, so it’s not something there’s a lot of scientific literature about, and we just have to figure out what works for us.

    I’d hypothesize that the reason tea causes a problem but the supplement doesn’t, is because the reaction is not to the l-theanine, but rather to the tannins in the tea.

    This last Monday I wrote (inspired in part by your query) about l-theanine supplementation, and how it doesn’t require caffeine to unlock its benefits after all, by the way. So that’s that part in order.

    I can’t speak for interactions with your other supplements or medications without knowing what they are, but I’m not aware of any known issue, beyond that l-theanine will tend to give a gentler curve to the expression of some neurotransmitters. So, if for example you’re talking anything that affects that (e.g. antidepressants, antipsychotics, ADHD meds, sleepy/wakefulness meds, etc) then checking with your doctor is best.

    ❝Can you do something on collagen and keep use posted on pineapple, and yes love and look forward to each issue❞

    Glad you’re enjoying! We did write a main feature on collagen a little while back! Here it is:

    We Are Such Stuff As Fish Are Made Of

    As for pineapple, there’s not a lot to keep you posted about! Pineapple’s protein-digesting, DNA-unzipping action is well-established and considered harmless (if your mouth feels weird when you eat pineapple or drink pineapple juice, this is why, by the way) because no meaningful damage was done.

    For example:

    • Pineapple’s bromelain action is akin to taking apart a little lego model brick by brick (easy to fix)
    • Clastogenic genotoxicity is more like taking a blowtorch to the lego model (less easy to fix)

    Fun fact: pineapple is good against inflammation, because of the very same enzyme!

    ❝I never knew anything about the l- tea. Where can I purchase it?❞

    You can get it online quite easily! Here’s an example on Amazon

    ❝The 3 most important exercises don’t work if you can’t get on the floor. I’m 78, and have knee replacements. What about 3 best chair yoga stretches? Love your articles!❞

    Here are six!

    We turn the tables and ask you a question!

    We’ll then talk about this tomorrow:

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  • Wouldn’t It Be Nice To Have Regenerative Superpowers?

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    The Best-Laid Schemes of Mice and Medical Researchers…

    This is Dr. Ellen Heber-Katz. She’s an internationally-renowned immunologist and regeneration biologist, but her perhaps greatest discovery was accidental.

    Unlike in Robert Burns’ famous poem, this one has a happy ending!

    But it did involve the best-laid schemes of mice and medical researchers, and how they did indeed “gang gagly“ (or in the English translation, “go awry”).

    How it started…

    Back in 1995, she was conducting autoimmune research, and doing a mouse study. Her post-doc assistant was assigned to punch holes in the ears of mice that had received an experimental treatment, to distinguish them from the control group.

    However, when the mice were later checked, none of them had holes (nor even any indication there ever had been holes punched)—the experiment was ruined, though the post-doc swore she did her job correctly.

    So, they had to start from scratch in the new year, but again, a second batch of mice repeated the trick. No holes, no wounds, no scarring, not disruption to their fur, no damage to the cartilage that had been punched through.

    In a turn of events worthy of a superhero origin story, they discovered that their laboratory-made autoimmune disease had accidentally given the mice super-healing powers of regeneration.

    In the animal kingdom, this is akin to a salamander growing a new tail, but it’s not something usually found in mammals.

    Read: A New Murine Model for Mammalian Wound Repair and Regeneration

    How it’s going…

    Dr. Heber-Katz and colleagues took another 20 years of work to isolate hypoxia-inducible factor-1a (HIF-1a) as a critical molecule that, if blocked, would eliminate the regenerative response.

    Further, a drug (which they went on to patent), 1,4-dihydrophenonthrolin-4-one-3-carboxylic acid (1,4-DPCA), chemically induced this regenerative power:

    See: Drug-induced regeneration in adult mice

    Another 5 years later, they found that this same drug can be used to stimulate the regrowth of bones, too:

    An injectable hydrogel-formulated inhibitor of prolyl-4-hydroxylase promotes T regulatory cell recruitment and enhances alveolar bone regeneration during resolution of experimental periodontitis

    And now…

    The research is continuing. Here’s the latest, a little over a month ago:

    Epithelial–mesenchymal transition: an organizing principle of mammalian regeneration

    Regrowing nerves has also been added into the list of things the drug can do.

    What about humans?

    Superpowered mice are all very well and good, but when can we expect this in humans?

    The next step is testing the drug in larger animals, which she hopes to do next year, followed eventually by studies in humans.

    Read the latest:

    Regrowing nerves and healing without scars? A scientist’s career-long quest comes closer to fruition

    Very promising!

    Don’t Forget…

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