AGING TOXINS IN OUR ENVIRONMENT

If you’ve ever seared a steak on a grill and watched a brown

crust develop, you’ve seen glycation at work. Browning

indicates the formation of exogenous (formed outside the

body) AGEs. This is known as the Maillard reaction. In

truth, the processing of food of any kind creates AGEs, but

dry, high-heat methods of cooking like barbecuing or

roasting are particularly promotive of AGE formation, and

processed meats (sausages and hot dogs, for example)

contain a higher amount than their more natural forms. The

safest cooking style involves moist heat, such as sautéing or

steaming. (Plants will contain fewer AGEs than meat,

regardless of cooking style.)

This may cause some to wonder if they should skip themeat altogether, but judging the health quality of a food

strictly by its AGE content would be a mistake. Broiled wild

salmon, for example, contains a considerable amount of

AGEs, and yet wild fish consumption has been associated

with healthy cognitive and cardiovascular aging in many

studies and trials. Additionally, many anthropologists

believe that it wasn’t just the consumption of meat but the

very act of cooking it that helped our ancestors to extract

more calories and nutrients from their food, allowing our

brains to reach their robust modern size. The safest way to

integrate meat products into your diet is to consume cuts

that are organic and grass-fed (or wild, if we’re talking fish),

which will ensure higher amounts of antioxidants, and to

use as little heat as possible (though, of course, you’ll need

to cook food thoroughly enough to avoid illness).

It’s also important to bear in mind that only between 10

and 30 percent of exogenous AGEs get absorbed into your

body. Antioxidant nutrients like polyphenols and fiber,

which are abundant in plant foods, can also neutralize these

aging toxins before they’re able to make it into your

system. If you’d like to treat yourself to roasted chicken (a

fairly rich source of AGEs), for example, opting for a

heaping plate of dark leafy greens on the side might help

minimize the impact. This also helps broker a more pleasant

interaction between those AGEs and the trillions of bacteria

that reside in your gut—important players in your brain

function, as you’ll see.

Added Sugar: The Brain Bane

Added sugar has become one of the worst evils in our

modern food supply. Intended by nature to be consumed in

small amounts via whole fruit, where it’s packaged with

fiber, water, and nutrients, sugar has become the pervasive

addition to countless packaged foods and sweetened

beverages. Now, finally, nutrition labels in the United States

are mandated to list the amount of sugar added to products

—definitely not a cure-all, but a move in the right direction.

Whether the sugar is single-origin organic cane sugar,

brown rice syrup, or the industry darling high-fructose corn

syrup (HFCS), one thing is clear: the safest level of added

sugar consumption is zero.

One of the dangers of sugar consumption is that it can

hijack our brain’s pleasure centers. Packaged foods with

added sugar usually taste “impossibly delicious” and cause

massive spikes of dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in

reward. Unfortunately, the more we consume, the more we

require to reach the same threshold of pleasure. Sound

familiar?

It should: sugar, in the way it stimulates the release

of dopamine, resembles drugs of abuse. In fact, in animal

models, rats prefer sugar over cocaine—and rats really like

cocaine.

To borrow a term from Sigmund Freud, rodents are all id

— meaning they give in to their cravings. They don’t have

responsibilities (at least in the human sense), and they

certainly don’t have to worry about looking good in bathing

suits. This is why rat studies are an important part of

understanding how food—and in particular sugar—affectsour behavior. From rats we’ve learned, for example, that

fructose in particular may promote its own consumption.

When rats were fed the same number of calories from either

fructose or glucose, glucose (like potato starch) induced

satiety (a feeling of fullness). Fructose, on the other hand,

actually provoked more feeding—it somehow made the rats

hungrier. The lesson to be inferred is that sugar, and perhaps

especially fructose, may actually be causing you to overeat

(more on this below).

These insights are crucial, because we tend to feel guilty

when we go through an entire bag of chips (or pint of ice

cream, or box of cookies). Been there? Me too. What

nobody tells us as we peruse the aisles lined with airpumped bags of bliss is that these foods are literally

engineered to create insatiable overconsumption, designed

in labs by well-paid food scientists to be hyper-palatable.

Salt, sugar, fat, and often wheat flour are combined to

maximize pleasure, driving your brain’s reward system to an

artificial “bliss point” that simulates the addictive properties

of controlled substances. Remember the famous slogan

“Once you pop, you can’t stop”? It’s now a truism with

scientific backing