This is Kimberly Wilson. She’s a psychologist, not a doctor, and/but her speciality is neurophysiology and brain health.

Here’s what she wants us to know…

Avoid this very common killer

As you’re probably aware, the #1 killer in the US is heart disease, followed by COVID, which effectively pushed everything down a place. Thereafter, we see cancer, followed by accidental injuries, stroke, and dementia (including Alzheimer’s).

Over in the UK, where Wilson is from, dementia (including Alzheimer’s disease) is the #1 killer, followed by heart disease and then respiratory diseases (including COVID), and then stroke, then cancer.

As ever, what’s good for the heart is good for the brain, so many of the same interventions will help avoid both. With regard to some of the other differences in order, the reasons are mostly due to differences in the two countries’ healthcare systems and firearms laws.

It’s worth noting, though, that the leading cause of death in young people (aged 15–19) is suicide in the UK; in the US it’s nominally accidental injuries first (e.g. accidental shootings) with intentional suicide in the second spot.

In other words… Young or old, mental health is a serious health category that kills literally the most people in the UK, and also makes the top spots in the US.

Avoid the early killer

Given the demographics of most of our readership, chances are you’ve already lived past your teens and twenties. That’s not to say that suicide is no longer a risk, though, and it’s also worth noting that while mental health issues are invisible, they’re still physical illnesses (the brain is also an organ, after all!), so this isn’t something where you can simply “decide not to” and that’s you set, safe for life. So, please do continue to take good care in that regard.

We wrote about this previously, here:

How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)

Avoid the later killer

Wilson talks about how a recent survey found that…

• while nearly half of adults say dementia is the disease they fear most,
• only a third of those thought you could do anything to avoid it, and
• just 1% could name the 7 known risk factors.

Quick test: can you name the 7 known risk factors?

Please take a moment to actually try (this kind of mental stimulation is good in any case), and count them out on your fingers (or write them down), and then…

When you’re ready: click here to see the answer!

How many did you get? If you got them all, well done. If not, then well, now you know, so that’s good.

So, with those 7 things in mind, the first obvious advice is to take care of those things.

Taking an evidence-based medicine approach, Wilson recommends some specific interventions that will each improve one or more of those things, directly or indirectly:

Eating right

Wilson is a big fan of “nutritional psychiatry” and feeding one’s brain properly. We wrote about this, here:

The 6 Pillars Of Nutritional Psychiatry

As well as agreeing with the obvious “eat plenty of fiber, different-colored plants, and plenty of greens and beans”, Wilson specifically also champions getting enough of vitamins B9, B12, and D, as well as getting a healthy dose of omega-3 fatty acids.

She also recommends intermittent fasting, if that’s a reasonable option for you—but advocates for not worrying about it, if it’s not easy for you. For example, if you are diabetic, or have (or have a history with) some kind of eating disorder(s), then it’s probably not usefully practicable. But for most people, it can reduce systemic inflammation, which means also reducing neuroinflammation.

Managing stress right

Here she advocates for three main things:

1. Mindful meditation (see: Evidence-Based, No-Frills Mindfulness)
2. Psychological resilience (see: Building Psychological Resilience)
3. Mindful social media use (see: Making Social Media Work For Your Mental Health)

Managing money right

Not often we talk about this in a health science publication as opposed to a financial planning publication, but the fact is that a lot of mental distress, which goes on to have a huge impact on the brain, is rooted in financial stresses.

And, of course, it’s good to be able to draw on financial resources to directly fund one’s good health, but that is the secondary consideration here—the financial stress is the biggest issue, and you can’t CBT your way out of debt, for example.

Therapists often face this, and what has been referred to informally by professionals in the field as “Shit Life Syndrome”—and there’s only so much that therapy can do about that.

We’re not a financial publication, but one recommendation we’ll drop is that if you don’t currently have budgeting software that you use, this writer personally uses and swears by YNAB (You Need A Budget), so maybe check that out if you don’t already have everything covered in that regard. It’s not free, but there is a 34-day free trial.

Therapy can be very worthwhile nonetheless

Wilson notes that therapy is like non-invasive brain surgery (because of neuroplasticity, it’s literally changing physical things in your brain).

It’s not a magic bullet and it’s not the right choice for everyone, but it’s worth considering, and even self-therapy can yield benefits for many:

The Gym For Your Mental Health: Getting The Most Out Of Therapy

Sleeping right

Sleep is not only critical for health in general and brain health in particular, it’s also most of when our glymphatic system does clean-up in the brain (essential for avoiding Alzheimer’s & Parkinson’s, amongst other diseases):

How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)

Want to know more from Kimberley Wilson?

We reviewed a book of hers recently, here:

Unprocessed: What your Diet Is Doing To Your Brain – by Kimberley Wilson

However, much of what we shared today was sourced from another book of hers that we haven’t reviewed yet but probably will do one of these days:

How to Build a Healthy Brain: Reduce stress, anxiety and depression and future-proof your brain – by Kimberley Wilson

Enjoy!

Some Surprising Truths About Hunger And Satiety

This is Dr. Barbara Rolls. She’s Professor and Guthrie Chair in Nutritional Sciences, and Director of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior at Pennsylvania State University, after graduating herself from Oxford and Cambridge (yes, both). Her “awards and honors” take up four A4 pages, so we won’t list them all here.

Most importantly, she’s an expert on hunger, satiety, and eating behavior in general.

What does she want us to know?

First and foremost: you cannot starve yourself thin, unless you literally starve yourself to death.

What this is about: any weight lost due to malnutrition (“not eating enough” is malnutrition) will always go back on once food becomes available. So unless you die first (not a great health plan), merely restricting good will always result in “yo-yo dieting”.

So, to avoid putting the weight back on and feeling miserable every day along the way… You need to eat as much as you feel you need.

But, there’s a trick here (it’s about making you genuinely feel you need less)!

Your body is an instrument—so play it

Your body is the tool you use to accomplish pretty much anything you do. It is, in large part, at your command. Then there are other parts you can’t control directly.

Dr. Rolls advises taking advantage of the fact that much of your body is a mindless machine that will simply follow instructions given.

That includes instructions like “feel hungry” or “feel full”. But how to choose those?

Volume matters

An important part of our satiety signalling is based on a physical sensation of fullness. This, by the way, is why bariatric surgery (making a stomach a small fraction of the size it was before) works. It’s not that people can’t eat more (the stomach is stretchy and can also be filled repeatedly), it’s that they don’t want to eat more because the pressure sensors around the stomach feel full, and signal the hormone leptin to tell the brain we’re full now.

Now consider:

• On the one hand, 20 grapes, fresh and bursting with flavor
• On the other hand, 20 raisins (so, dried grapes), containing the same calories

Which do you think will get the leptin flowing sooner? Of course, the fresh grapes, because of the volume.

So if you’ve ever seen those photos that show two foods side by side with the same number of calories but one is much larger (say, a small slice of pizza or a big salad), it’s not quite the cheap trick that it might have appeared.

Or rather… It is a cheap trick; it’s just a cheap trick that works because your stomach is quite a simple organ.

So, Dr. Rolls’ advice: generally speaking, go for voluminous food. Fruit is great from this, because there’s so much water. Air-popped popcorn also works great. Vegetables, too.

Water matters, but differently than you might think

A well-known trick is to drink water before and with a meal. That’s good, it’s good to be hydrated. However, it can be better. Dr. Rolls did an experiment:

The design:

❝Subjects received 1 of 3 isoenergetic (1128 kJ) preloads 17 min before lunch on 3 d and no preload on 1 d.

The preloads consisted of 1) chicken rice casserole, 2) chicken rice casserole served with a glass of water (356 g), and 3) chicken rice soup.

The soup contained the same ingredients (type and amount) as the casserole that was served with water.❞

The results:

❝Decreasing the energy density of and increasing the volume of the preload by adding water to it significantly increased fullness and reduced hunger and subsequent energy intake at lunch.

The equivalent amount of water served as a beverage with a food did not affect satiety.❞

The conclusion:

❝Consuming foods with a high water content more effectively reduced subsequent energy intake than did drinking water with food.❞

You can read the study in full (it’s a worthwhile read!) here:

Water incorporated into a food but not served with a food decreases energy intake in lean women

Protein matters

With all those fruits and vegetables and water, you may be wondering Dr. Rolls’ stance on proteins. It’s simple: protein is an appetite suppressant.

However, it takes about 20 minutes to signal the brain about that, so having some protein in a starter (if like this writer, you’re the cook of the household, a great option is to enjoy a small portion of nuts while cooking!) gets that clock ticking, to signal satiety sooner.

It may also help in other ways:

Clinical Evidence and Mechanisms of High-Protein Diet-Induced Weight Loss

As for other foods that can suppress appetite, by the way, you might like;

25 Foods That Act As Natural Appetite Suppressants

Variety matters, and in ways other than you might think

A wide variety of foods (especially: a wide variety of plants) in one’s diet is well recognized as a key to a good balanced diet.

However…

A wide variety of dishes at the table, meanwhile, promotes greater consumption of food.

Dr. Rolls did a study on this too, a while ago now (you’ll see how old it is) but the science seems robust:

Variety in a Meal Enhances Food Intake in Man

Notwithstanding the title, it wasnot about a man (that was just how scientists wrote in ye ancient times of 1981). The test subjects were, in order: rats, cats, a mixed group of men and women, the same group again, and then a different group of all women.

So, Dr. Rolls’ advice is: it’s better to have one 20-ingredient dish, than 10 dishes with 20 ingredients between them.

Sorry! We love tapas and buffets too, but that’s the science!

So, “one-pot” meals are king in this regard; even if you serve it with one side (reasonable), that’s still only two dishes, which is pretty good going.

Note that the most delicious many-ingredient stir-fries and similar dishes from around the world also fall into this category!

Want to know more?

If you have the time (it’s an hour), you can enjoy a class of hers for free:

!

Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later

Enjoy!