The following is an excerpt from the new book, GRAIN BRAIN: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar - Your Brain's Silent Killers by Dr. David Perlmutter (Little, Brown and Co., 2013).

Imagine being transported back to the Paleolithic era of early humans who lived in caves and roamed the savannas tens of thousands of years ago. Pretend, for a moment, that language is not a barrier and you can communicate easily. You have the opportunity to tell them what the future is like.

From a cross-legged perch on a dirt floor in front of a warm fire, you start by describing the wonders of our high-tech world, with its planes, trains, and automobiles, city skyscrapers, computers, televisions, smart phones, and the information highway that is the Internet. Humans have already traveled to the moon and back. At some point, the conversation moves to other lifestyle topics and what it's like to really live in the twenty-first century.

You dive into describing modern medicine with its stupendous array of drugs to treat problems and combat diseases and germs. Serious threats to survival are few and far between. Not many people need to worry about crouching tigers, famine, and pestilence. You explain what it's like to shop at grocery stores and supermarkets, a totally foreign concept to these individuals. Food is plentiful, and you mention things like cheeseburgers, French fries, soda, pizza, bagels, bread, cinnamon rolls, pancakes, waffles, scones, pasta, cake, chips, crackers, cereal, ice cream, and candy. You can eat fruit all year long and access virtually any kind of food at the touch of a button or short drive away. Water and juice come in bottles for transportability.

Recently, I've been hearing from many patients who have read Dr. Perlmutter's new book, Grain Brain, and are now concerned about their carb intake. In his book, Dr. Perlmutter suggests that dietary carbohydrates cause high blood sugar, inflammation, and other effects that lead to a "toxic brain," which can then develop into neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, depression, and others. Based on this line of causality, he recommends that everyone consume a very low carb diet (<60g per day) in order to prevent neurological disease.

First of all, I'd like to point out that very low carb (VLC) and ketogenic diets can be effective therapeutic tools for treating many neurological disorders. I touched on this briefly a while back in my podcast with Emily Deans, and initial studies on low-carb diets and mental health have shown promise. (1, 2, 3, 4)

Because Dr. Perlmutter is a neurologist, it makes sense that he would be a proponent of low-carb diets for his patients based on these therapeutic effects.

However, recommending a low-carb diet as an intervention for sick people is very different from promoting it as a preventative measure for the entire population, which is what Dr. Perlmutter does in Grain Brain. His approach would be somewhat akin to recommending that everyone go on the Autoimmune Protocol to prevent autoimmune disease, which would be unnecessarily restrictive and unhelpful.


It's important to realize that just because a low-carb diet can help treat neurological disorders, doesn't mean the carbs caused the disorder in the first place. While I don't argue with the idea that refined and processed carbs like flour and sugar contribute to modern disease, there's no evidence to suggest that unrefined, whole-food carbohydrates do. In fact, there are three compelling reasons why this is not the case.

Jet lag, shift work, and even late nights staring at your tablet or smartphone may be making you sick. That's because the body's internal clock is set for two 12-hour periods of light and darkness, and when this rhythm is thrown off, so is the immune system. One reason may be that the genes that set the body clock are intimately connected to certain immune cells, according to a new study.

The finding "was a happy accident," says Lora Hooper, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. She and her colleagues were studying NFIL3, a protein that guides the development of certain immune cells and turns on the activity of others. The gene for this protein is mutated in some human patients with inflammatory bowel disease, and mice lacking the gene for NFIL3, the team found, had more so-called T_H17 cells in their intestines.

These cells are a type of immune cell known as a T cell. They get their name from a signal they produce, called interleukin 17, which tells other T cells to increase the immune response. In normal numbers, T_H17 cells, which live in the intestines, help the body fight bacterial and fungal infections.

But when there are too many, the immune defense begins to cause illness rather than prevent it. Boosting NFIL3 levels in T cells growing in lab cultures resulted in fewer of them turning into T_H17 cells, the researchers found, suggesting that the protein's job is to prevent T cells from going into that area of specialization. The absence of the protein, the team concluded, leads to runaway T_H17 activity.

The Alberta government introduced new legislation on Thursday which makes it illegal to smoke in a vehicle where anyone under the age of 18 is present.

The Tobacco Reduction Amendment Act or Bill 33 will also ban the use of waterpipes in public areas like restaurants. If passed, the government plans to give businesses 12 to 18 months to comply with the new legislation.

"We'll proclaim the bill in parts so we can give people an opportunity to transition," Health Minister Fred Horne said.

The government also plans to support Bill 206, a private members bill banning the sale of flavoured tobacco products.

Health experts believe that flavoured tobacco gets young people hooked on smoking. However, it isn't clear if menthol will be included under the ban.

"We're not taking a position at this point on menthol specifically what we're supporting is a bill that would allow us to target any flavoured product," Horne said.

Two sisters from Mount Horeb say a cervical cancer vaccine shut down their ovaries and almost certainly left them unable to get pregnant, a claim scheduled for a hearing Thursday and Friday in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Madelyne Meylor, 20, and Olivia Meylor, 19, say their premature ovarian failure came from the vaccine against human papillomavirus, or HPV.

It's the first allegation that the vaccine caused the condition to reach a hearing through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, said their attorney, Mark Krueger, of Baraboo.

Health officials recommend three doses of the vaccine against HPV, a sexually transmitted virus, for girls and boys ages 11 and 12 to protect against cervical cancer, throat cancer, genital warts and other conditions. Two brands are available: Gardasil, approved in 2006, and Cervarix, approved in 2009.

The vaccine injury program has awarded payments for HPV vaccine injuries in 68 cases for a total of at least $5.9 million, according to the federal government and Judicial Watch, a nonpartisan foundation. The program has dismissed 63 claims and 81 claims are pending.

About 22,000 adverse reactions from the HPV vaccine were reported nationally from June 2006 to March 2013, a period in which 57 million doses were distributed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 92 percent of the reactions, including the most common ones - fainting, dizziness and nausea - weren't serious, the CDC said.

Scientists are reporting the earliest behavioral sign to date that a child is likely to develop autism: when and how long a baby looks at other people's eyes.

In a study published Wednesday, researchers using eye-tracking technology found that 3-year-olds diagnosed with autism looked less at people's eyes when they were babies than children who did not develop autism.

But contrary to what the researchers expected, the difference was not apparent at birth. It emerged when babies were 2 to 6 months old, and autism experts said that may suggest a window during which the progression toward autism can be halted or slowed.

The study, published online in the journal Nature, found that infants who later received a diagnosis of began spending less time looking at people's eyes between 2 and 6 months of age and paid less and less attention to eyes as they grew older. By contrast, babies who did not develop autism looked increasingly at people's eyes until about 9 months old, and then kept their attention to eyes fairly constant into toddlerhood.

More and more people are turning toward a gluten free diet to help improve mysterious medical conditions. This new awareness of the gluten free lifestyle is definitely very positive. The problem however lies in the foods being sold as gluten free replacements. The gluten free food industry has blossomed into a multi-billion dollar business. With this, we see a rash of unhealthy, highly processed foods being used as replacement fillers.

Breaking The Cardinal Rule of Nutrition

It is in this that the cardinal rule of nutrition is being broken. What is the cardinal rule? Simple - one cannot achieve or maintain health eating unhealthy foods. Now all we have to do is define healthy. This is where a lot of confusion sets in. Healthy for one, many not be healthy for another. I have had patients react to blueberries and broccoli. So part of how we define healthy for an individual is by following the next three rules -

1. Don't eat foods that you are allergic or intolerant to (get tested to avoid confusion)
2. Don't eat it if it makes you feel bad.
3. If you can't pronounce the terms on the ingredients label without a biochemistry degree or lots of practice, then it is not healthy.

"I'm 98 percent confident we can make a tomato that tastes substantially better," Professor Harry Klee recently exulted to the New York Times.

Hmmm. Excuse me, professor, but "substantially better" than what? One of Momma Nature's own heirloom varieties perhaps? No, no - Klee knows that tomato-tampering flavorologists like him can't get near that quality. Rather, he's merely out to endow the industrial, massed-produced fruits of agribusiness with enough tomato-y taste to pass as a minimally-acceptable version of the real thing.

Cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra says the obsession with a low-fat diet has "paradoxically increased" the risk of heart disease.

Other experts have added their voices to his controversial call to end 40 years of advice to cut saturated fat - which has been described as "the greatest medical error of our time".

They claim the guidance has left millions of people at risk of developing cardiovascular ­disease and "led to the over-medication of millions of people with statins".

The public could just as effectively protect themselves by eating "real" food such as butter, milk and cheese and adopting the Mediterranean diet.


Dr Malhotra, an interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University Hospital, London, slammed the routine prescriptions of statins and claimed a diet high in saturated fats could be three times more effective at lowering cholesterol.

Writing on bmj.com, he said a preoccupation with levels of total cholesterol "has diverted our attention" from the worse risks of a condition known as atherogenic ­dyslipidaemia, which is an unfavourable ratio of blood fats.

He said saturated fat has been demonised since the 1970s when a landmark study found a link between coronary heart disease and total ­cholesterol, which correlated with the percentage of calories provided by saturated fat.

He said: "But correlation is not causation. Nevertheless, we were advised to cut fat intake to 30 per cent of total energy and a fall in saturated fat to 10 per cent."

A new study revealed how Americans living close to busy highways or roads are more likely to contract various diseases compared to those living far from congested streets.

We have known about the effects of motor vehicle pollution on people living near major highways for more than 20 years, yet that knowledge has not stemmed the building of tracts of homes and high-rises almost on top of those thoroughfares.

It's a vicious, never-ending cycle of increased population growth, with the need for more vehicles, leading to the need for more highways. Add to this conglomeration the increasing need for additional petroleum products and we have a problem of gigantic proportions.

Besides ongoing studies on the effects of noise pollution caused by highway noise, there have also been numerous studies on the pollution caused by vehicular emissions has on our health.

The health care community has known for a long time that people living within 300 feet of major roadways were more prone to respiratory ailments, allergies, certain kinds of cancers and heart disease. The elderly and very young children seemed to be hit even harder, studies have shown.