Dr. Annie Fenn: Brain healthy food habits

There’s not many 43-minute podcasts you really need to hear. This is one of them. Annie Fenn offers a masterclass in creating a nutritional foundation for maximal brain health and muscle building in midlife and beyond. I learned a lot during our conversation, and I’m pretty sure you will, too.

No more lunch meat or salted nuts, for instance.

Annie Fenn, MD is the author of, ”The Brain Health Kitchen: Preventing Alzheimer’s Through Food,” a science-based cookbook for the brain. You may be familiar with her incredibly substantive, fact-packed Substack, Brain Health Kitchen. Annie, who’s a board-certified OB-GYN, is also a trained chef, making her advice about nutrition and brain health essential for building a strategy to maintain superior cognitive function throughout life.

How to build brain healthy eating habits:

01:25 — ”What you eat at midlife seems to be particularly predictive of whether you become vulnerable to one of these neurodegenerative diseases.”

02:08 — “Most of the dementia that people get has a very strong dietary link. That’s why what you do at midlife is so incredibly important.”

04:45 — How “food environments” create better nutrition habits.

05:15 — “Unless you address your food environment, I don’t think it’s really possible to make meaningful change.”

06:23 — ”What’s your brain health mindset?” (Figure out what really motivates you to alter entrenched eating habits.)

07:45 — Building “your own brain-food pyramid.”

09:11 — The building blocks of the Mediterranean Diet: “peasant food.”

11:48 — Making beans and legumes a bigger part of your brain-healthy eating habits.

17:01 — How to go from a bad food environment to a healthy food environment.

19:31 — Vegetarian and vegan diets.

21:27 — Eggs, cardiovascular risk and nutritional cholesterol vs. blood cholesterol.

24:57 — Defining what is and isn’t “processed meat;” how bad is lunch meat, really?

26:35 — Processed meat and “AGEs”: a recipe for inflammation and brain aging.

27:39 — How to cook meat to avoid AGEs and the problems it’s associated with.

31:35 — Protein for people over 40; the relationship between protein and dementia.

33:40 — “Strength training is mandatory for women,” especially after their late 30s.

36:00 — Is there a gender divide in nutrition for people over 50?

37:20 — Getting strong and eating enough protein in perimenopause to ward off pre-diabetes, muscle loss and other potential issues.

38:20 — Sugary drinks: a metabolic and brain health disaster.

40:45 — Annie’s Top 3 takeaways for eating healthy after 50.

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