David Perlmutter - Grain Brain (2013)

The essential aspects of this book were extremely interesting, although I had to wade through all the padding to find them. The theory is that an addiction to grains, gluten and sugar is destroying our brains and leading to the recent rise in dementia, Alzheimer's, arthritis and auto-immune disease's in today's society.

Perlmutter makes a very strong case for going off addictive foods and developing healthier brains that don't start their early decline, more frighteningly in teenagers as much as adults, in our current processed foods addicted society.

I found the information that everything we eat contains gluten very helpful. It's what triggers the process in our brains and makes us want to eat more of it because we briefly feel a happy-sated reaction and we want to feel it over and over again. This is why I avoid Krispy Kreme Doughnuts - anything that makes me that happy must be super-bad for me.

The trick is finding something to eat or do that replaces the opiate-like gluten reaction in our brains and supports its healthy development. Easy? No. Everyone is different and it will take a lot of trial and error to find what is right for you. So the book lets us know we have a problem, but there's no easy solution to it. Perlmutter describes it as going off a drug and just abstaining, but we're confronted by gluten foods constantly in society, so abstaining isn't enough. There needs to be a better process in place that makes the gluten reaction redundant.

I'll go think on it while I eat my vegemite toast, my tea and biscuits, my gluten-enriched vegetable chow mein...