Power Foods for the Brain (23 page)

So let’s come back to the question that started us off: Why do we eat foods that we know are not good for us? Because they bathe our brains in dopamine. And dopamine won’t take no for an answer. It glamorizes every last detail of whatever triggered it—the sweetness of sugar, the sizzle of a steak, and even the moldy smell of cheese.

Look at a wine connoisseur. At one point in his life, wine was not important to him. The first bitter taste might even have been a bit off-putting. But alcohol triggers dopamine, which embellishes every aspect of the drink that delivered it. He no longer speaks of how a wine smells; it now has a “bouquet.” The color of the wine, its taste, its aftertaste, and the feel of the stem of the glass between his fingers—all engender glowing poetry, because they have been wildly oversold by dopamine.

Dopamine gets you into trouble. Up until now, good health, a long life, and a trim figure might have been high on your list of priorities, but chocolate, burgers, and cheese pizza elbow their way ahead of them. Have a candy bar—or two or three, your reward center tells you. Don’t worry, just enjoy it, it insists.

So where is your Brian Epstein in all of this? Where’s your internal manager who is supposed to talk you out of things you’ll regret later? Unfortunately, dopamine got him, too. In fact, your cerebral cortex is recruited to help support the addiction. You’ll find yourself coming up with increasingly far-fetched rationalizations for why you
ought
to set aside caution. “I can
exercise those calories off,” your now-corrupted brain tells you. “Everything in moderation,” “My grandfather ate all the wrong things and lived to be ninety, so how bad can it be?” and so on. Your priorities have been reset, and your entire brain has been recruited to embrace the culture of dopamine.

There are certain times when you’ll be especially susceptible to dopamine’s siren call. When you are stressed, angry, lonely, or tired—when the world has treated you badly—you are not likely to look for solace in healthful foods. No one ever went to a convenience store at nine o’clock at night to buy cauliflower. That’s when we turn to sugary cookies, chocolate bars, cheesy pizza, greasy burgers, or other junk food. We call them “comfort foods,” because that is exactly the effect opiates and dopamine provide.

Some people are vulnerable for a different reason. Their genes conspire against them. During a research study on diabetes, I found that while some people changed their diets easily, others had a tougher time, and I wondered whether genes might explain this difference. It was already known that we all have a gene called DRD2—dopamine receptor D2—that is involved in building the receptors for dopamine. These receptors are like little docks on the outside of each cell, ready to receive the latest shipment of dopamine as it arrives. One variant of this gene causes you to have about one-third fewer dopamine receptors. And with fewer receptors, you do not get the same “feel-good” sensations other people get from dopamine. You would need an extra amount of dopamine just to feel normal. So you could end up being drawn to alcohol, smoking, drugs of abuse, and even risk-taking behavior, all of which give you an extra dose of the dopamine you are missing. About one in five people carries this genetic trait.

I took blood samples from each of our participants and sent
them to the University of California at Los Angeles, where Ernest Noble, MD, extracted their DNA. A short time later, Dr. Noble called me on the telephone. He had found that
nearly half of our diabetes patients had the gene variant that caused them to have too few dopamine receptors.
⁴
That was far higher than the normal one-in-five prevalence of this genetic trait. Moreover, when we tracked how our patients did over time, those with the gene for too few dopamine receptors did not respond as well to a healthy diet—they did not improve as much—compared with people who had the normal number of receptors, presumably because they had more trouble with cravings and lapses.

I began to suspect that many people overeat in order to get dopamine stimulation. They are not aware of what is happening inside their brains, but they are drawn to food, especially unhealthful foods—more so than other people. They find it hard to break away. And when overeating gets into high gear, it leads to obesity, diabetes, and myriad other problems, including a higher risk of brain disorders.

If you are thinking you might like to be tested to see if your own food cravings could be due to a genetic trait, it is important to understand that
anyone
can fall victim to the addictive power of foods, no matter what genes you carry. Food manufacturers are doing everything they can to seduce your taste buds and keep you in a state of constant temptation with displays of food products in stores, gas stations, and airports and on television. They can easily overpower your inner manager, and they know it.

So am I saying that weight problems and diabetes are caused by dopamine? Yes, in part. And the same is true for heart disease, high blood pressure, and every other condition related to food, including Alzheimer’s disease and stroke. In all of these conditions, the drive for dopamine draws you to the very foods
that can hurt and kill you. It is dopamine that pushes you in front of the train.

Now, let’s not be overly simplistic. Other genes play important roles in our disease risk, too, and even if you were on a perfect diet, you could still have health problems. Life is not fair. But eating healthfully goes a long way toward preventing health problems, and it is increasingly clear that there is a reason why unhealthful foods attract us. That reason lies deep inside our brain cells in tiny vesicles filled with dopamine.

Is there a healthy way to get dopamine? Can we get a little bit of “feel good” without drugs, booze, or junk food? Well, I thought you’d never ask!

There actually are a couple of ways. First, you can break a sweat. Exercise releases mild opiates—endorphins—and also appears to trigger the release of dopamine. If you were to get up in the morning and have a half-hour run or a brisk walk, the natural feel-good sensation that comes from exercise would make you less likely to turn to unhealthful foods later in the day.

Second, there is a role for intimacy. If food is your preferred form of “comfort,” it’s time to have
real
comfort, which comes from developing friendships, engaging in conversations, intimacy, sexuality—any or all of the varieties of personal interaction.

But let’s think beyond dopamine. Forty years before the Beatles and eight hundred miles away, Sigmund Freud wrote about the Beatles and Brian Epstein. He did not use their names, of course; they had not yet been born. But Freud described the unruly drives that well up from deep and primitive brain structures. For Freud, those scruffy, fun-loving, irresponsible,
troublemaking desires were the
id
. And the manager—the more mature, forward-thinking part of ourselves—was the
ego.
The ego’s job, like Epstein’s, was not to frustrate the id. It was to help the id succeed. The ego makes plans, keeps you on schedule, and maintains the long view.

But the ego has limits, too, as Epstein illustrated so tragically. Freud wrote that there is a third brain function, called the
superego
. The superego is not there to manage your primitive drives. It looks beyond them, and helps you see the bigger picture around you. When you aspire to do good in the world, setting aside your own desires—that’s the superego in action. And when you feel guilty about having let someone down, that’s the superego, too. It is the part of you that thinks about others.

The ego—your manager—is not a particularly high-minded soul. The truth is, it just wants its percentage. That is, it helps you negotiate your world more effectively, and you’ll both be better off. The superego is something else entirely. It looks at the needs of the world around us.

That broader view can save your life. It can provide the motivation you need to break away from unhealthy habits. Sir Paul McCartney described exactly this as he recalled looking out the window at his farm in Scotland. He was sitting with his wife Linda.

This change of heart did not come from any sort of drive or ambition. This was not the id talking. Nor did it come from a manager prescribing a good career move or health advice. Paul and Linda began to consider the world around them. And then they realized how food choices affected their children, too.

For most of human history, we did not need any dietary directives from our superego. Junk food simply was not available. We did not have an easy way to extract sugar from sugarcane or sugar beets, or to turn cacao beans into Snickers bars. Cheese hadn’t been thought of, and meat eating, while not impossible, was arduous enough that steakhouses and chicken restaurants just were not a winning proposition. And when these products became available, it was a long time before they were inexpensive enough to be as ubiquitous as they are nowadays.

Today technology has removed those barriers. Junk food is cheap. We can have it anytime we want it. It calls to us from every corner, and that’s where we run into trouble.

So I have two suggestions that are designed to help your ego and superego tackle that scruffy id of yours:

Set some rules.
If you are having trouble resisting any unhealthful food, whether it’s a greasy cheese sandwich, a chicken wing, or a sugary snack, you’ll find it easier to set it aside completely than to tease yourself by having it occasionally. This is the opposite of what many people imagine. “Maybe I can just have it now and then,” we say to ourselves. “A little bit
won’t hurt.” And in theory, that’s true. The problem is that each dose of a problem food triggers another dopamine blast that reinforces the desire for it. Each bite makes it harder to say no next time. By setting it aside—even for just a couple of weeks—we’re able to forget about it a bit once we get over that initial craving hump.

If that sounds like tough love, it’s exactly the lesson that smokers learned a long time ago. Quitting is not easy, but it is
much
easier than teasing yourself with an occasional cigarette. “Moderation”—for both cigarettes and junk food—is simply a way of stoking a fire rather than letting it go out.

Look to other motivators.
Many people break the meat habit, not for themselves, but because they view factory farming and animal transport and slaughter as something they want no part of. Today Americans eat
more than one million animals per hour.
Even in my grandfather’s day, it was not a remotely kind process, and today it is all the more miserable for all concerned.

Others are moved by reports of the environmental damage that modern factory-style farms engender. From the pesticides used to grow feed crops and the fecal output of chickens, hogs, and cattle that contaminate waterways, to the greenhouse gases emitted by the 100 million or so cattle grazing on American farms, raising livestock is no treat for Earth. These facts are motivating more and more people to change their diets.

One of the most common reasons people decide to take better care of themselves is that their spouses or children depend on them. Not only do we not want to burden our families if we become ill, we want to be there to help them through whatever problems they may encounter. We cannot afford to take risks with our own health that could mean abandoning them. And the more we model healthful habits, the more we help them to do the same.

Whatever your motivation for rethinking the contents of your plate, you will get a huge reward in the form of better health. And that will help you put dopamine in its place.

Now you know the secrets for keeping your brain and physical being well for a long and productive life. There are many recipes to sample, new tastes and new restaurants to try, and many things to explore.

I wish you the very best of luck, and I hope you will share what you’ve found with others.

T
he recipes that follow are the most delicious possible way to give your body and brain the nutrition they need. They are loaded with healthful vitamins and, at the same time, free of animal products, trans fats, and the overdose of toxic metals that are part of so many people’s diets. They are also quick to prepare, using familiar ingredients, and each one comes with a nutrient analysis so you can see exactly what you’re getting.

These recipes were developed by two inspired chefs with whom I have had the pleasure of working for years.