Preserving Brain Health in a Toxic Age

Book excerpt: Learn how to reduce the impact of environmental toxins on brain development, functioning, and health. The human brain is a marvelously complex organ that has evolved great new capabilities over the past 250,000 years. During most of that period, daily life was vastly different from our lives today. Exercise was not optional - one literally had to run for one’s life, livelihood, and sustenance. The Stone Age diet was not a fad, but the only food available. Periods of fasting arose from food scarcity, and hence the earliest keto-diet was commonplace. Life changed greatly with the advent of agriculture and industry. Diseases that were previously unknown or uncommon began to surface as by-products of civilization’s advance. Changes in our ways of living have altered the nature of illness as well as its diagnosis and treatment. From the 1970s to the present, tens of thousands of chemicals with applications in all aspects of our lives have grown more than 40-fold. Exposure to these new substances has impacted many aspects of our health, especially the delicate parts of the brain and nervous system. In parallel with the changes in our environment, we have seen the growth of brain disorders including Alzheimer’s Disease and autism in previously unimaginable ways. Here, Arnold Eiser elucidates some features of diseases affecting the nervous system that are increasing in incidence with a focus on those disorders that appear related to environmental toxins that modern life has introduced. He takes readers behind the scenes of the science itself to discover the human stories involved in the discovery and management of these illnesses. Offering insights from a variety of scientific disciplines, Eiser clearly and succinctly illustrates the impact of toxins on our brains and how we might better protect ourselves from negative outcomes. With interviews from leading authorities in the field of neuroscience, environmental toxicology, integrative medicine, neurology, immunology, geriatrics, and microbiology (re the gut microbiome), this book offers a robust understanding of the complex threats to our brains, and the healthy brain’s dependence upon many other systems within our bodies. This is a voyage of discovery into the science, history, and human struggle regarding disorders challenging the brain as well as their possible prevention.