Kyle Discovers: How the FOOD we eat affects our body and BRAIN

“Our cognitive health might be a choice that we make with every bite that we eat and we’re never too young or too old to make a brain-healthy choice.” – Max Lagavere

By Kyle Wilson | January 2023

Kyle Discovers is a mini docu-series by CareBlair that shares Kyle’s own journey of learning more about nutrition, health, fitness, and balance in life. He is sharing what he knows as he learns and applies it in his own life because he has recently became a full-time carer for two elderly and disabled family members.

Over the last couple of years, being a carer for those who are elderly and disabled has guided Kyle to develop a certain kind of advocacy for the very things that support and sustain life.

When we take on a caring role, no matter how small, we naturally become more aware about the affects of diet and lifestyle on those in our care.

And while we’re learning more about the food we choose to eat and share with others, we’re becoming more knowledgable and better able to use this information to help mediate the risk for developing (or controlling) Diabetes and neurological diseases such as Alzheimers and Dementia within ourselves and also for those within our care.

Every three seconds a new dementia case is diagnosed.

We were surprised, almost shocked, to discover that neurological diseases like Dementia are not a normal aspect of ageing, but it begins in the brain decades before the first symptom of memory loss.

We’ve discovered that Millennials, those who are currently between 26 and 41 years old, will be the first generation in human history that’s going to reach the age of 90, according to Stanford Centre on Longevity, America.

It’s easy to think that 70, 80, and 90 years old is a long way off from now.

And it’s understandable why many of us think that by the time we reach our senior years, we’re going to have some kind of miracle pharmaceutical cure and not have anything to worry about…

Here’s the thing though, Alzheimers was first discovered in 1906 by Alois Alzheimer, but 90% of all we’ve discovered about the disease has only came to us within the last 15 years.

That’s a gap of more than 100 years between the first discovery of Alzheimers and achieving the scientific breakthroughs that make possible our current modern day treatments.

Although the National Library of Medicine’s research reveals Alzheimers drug trials having a staggeringly high failure rate, we do have enough information today that tells us that for a significant proportion of people, it is a potentially preventable disease by making simple changes in our diet and lifestyle.

We’re discovering that 60% of the typical modern diet is based on the domestication of three crops: wheat, corn, and rice which are low in fat and extremely high in carbohydrates.

And these crops are pretty scarce when it comes to nutrients. They’re calorically dense, but they’re not nutritionally dense. Soon after eating, our bodies realise they didn’t get the nutrients and minerals it needs to properly fuel and repair itself so more hunger signals are sent to the brain.

Because wheat, corn, and rice are high in carbohydrates they do very well at sending our blood sugar through the roof!

High carbohydrate (broken down into simple sugars by our body) and sugar intakes have been associated with contributing to lower cortical thickness (the grey matter in our brains that scientists often view as a type of shield that protects against neurological diseases) and negatively affecting our cognitive ability over time.

And in a sample of elderly people, higher adherance to the Mediterranean diet (a high fat/low carb diet) was associated with larger cortical thickness that surrounds our brain helping to reduce the risk of cognitive impairment.

When it comes to preventing (or controlling) diabetes, the high fat/low carb diet is low in sugar and therefor associated with reduced insulin resistance helping to reverse the effects of diabetic symptoms in our bodies.

And since August 2022, Kyle has been able to spend some of his free time collaborating with one of his local market gardens, Taybank Growers Cooperative, to learn and discover more about their farm and their chemical-free practice of growing fruit and vegetables in healthy, nutritious soil for the benefit of their neigbours and surrounding communities. Available to watch sometime in the spring (2023).

Until then, we’re sharing some of the fascinating information we’re discovering around these topics in a separate upcoming CareBlair video about how we are managing and improving our own families daily nutrition at home.

For many of us, this is not about data and statistics, this is about the people we love and care about having the quality of life that we know they deserve.

In this Tedx talk, which inspired our video and article, Max Lugavere shares, “our cognitive health might be a choice that we make with every bite that we eat and we’re never too young or too old to make a brain-healthy choice.” 

Got a question, a thought, or an idea that you think might help this project? Share it with us on social media or email us and we’ll do our best to get back to you.

And until next time, remember, sharing is caring.

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