Genius Food

Avocados are an all-in-one Genius Food—the perfect food

to protect and enhance your brain. To start, they have the

highest total fat-protecting capacity of any fruit or vegetable.

This is good news for your brain, which is not only the

fattiest organ in your body, but also a magnet for oxidative

stress (a major driver of aging)—a consequence of the fact

that 25 percent of the oxygen you breathe goes to create

energy in your brain! Avocados are also rich in different

types of vitamin E (a characteristic not many supplements

can claim), and they are a potent repository for the

carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin. You may recall from

chapter 2 that these pigments can boost your brain’s

processing speed, but that they rely on fat to be properly

absorbed. Conveniently, avocados are an abundant source

of healthy fats.

Today there is an epidemic of vascular disease, not only

in the form of heart disease, but as vascular dementia, which

is the second most common form of dementia after

Alzheimer’s. Potassium works with sodium to regulate

blood pressure and is essential for vascular health, but today

we tend to consume insufficient amounts of potassium. In

fact, scientists believe that our hunter-gatherer ancestors

consumed four times as much potassium as we do today,

which may explain why hypertension, stroke, and vascular

dementia are now so common. By providing twice the

potassium content of a banana, a whole avocado is the

perfect food to nurture the brain’s estimated four hundred

miles of microvasculature.

Finally, who needs fiber supplements (or cheap,

industrially produced morning cereals) when you can eat an

avocado? One whole medium avocado contains a whopping

12 grams of fiber—food for the hungry bacteria that live in

your gut, which will ultimately pay their rent in the form of

life- and brain-sustaining compounds that reduce

inflammation, enhance insulin sensitivity, and boost growth

factors in the brain.

How to use: I try to eat a half to a whole avocado every

day. You can enjoy avocados simply sprinkled with a little

sea salt and extra-virgin olive oil. They may also be sliced

and added to salads, eggs, smoothies, or my Better Brain

Bowl (see page).

Pro tip: Avocados are known for taking a long time to

ripen, and only a day or two to foul. To keep extra avocados

from going bad, pop them in the fridge once ripe, and take

them out when ready to eat. You, 1; avocados, 0! A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an

invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building,

write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone,

comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act

alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch

manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight

efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects

Let us think back to a time before food delivery apps and

diet gurus, when “Trader Joe” was the guy guarding the

only salt lick in a hundred-mile radius and “biohacking”

was something you did to a fresh kill with a sharpened

stone. Government diet recommendations (or governments,

for that matter) wouldn’t arrive on the scene for millennia,

so you’d have to make do, as your ancestors did, with

intuition and availability. As a forager, your diet would

consist of a diverse array of land animals, fish, vegetables,

and wild fruits. The chief calorie contributor would by and

large be fat, followed by protein.

1 You might consume a

limited amount of starch, in the form of fiber-rich tubers,

nuts, and seeds, but concentrated sources of digestible

carbohydrate were highly limited, if you had access to them

at all.