Care and Feeding Your Brain While Aging

Use Your Brain to Change Your Age: Secrets to Look, Feel, and Think Younger Every Day by Daniel G. Amen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


*** Possible Spoilers ***

This isn't a bad book but it's a bit of overkill. Basically, brain health boils down to the obvious.

Eat well-balanced nutritious means. Stay away from sugar and cut back on the fats. Get plenty of protein through lean red meats, fish and chicken.
Drink lots of water.
Get a good night's sleep.
Stay away from alcohol, tobacco and drugs.
Get plenty of exercise. If some of it can be aerobic so much the better.
Stimulate your brain through continuous learning. Avoid too much routine. Be curious and try mental challenges.
As much as possible eliminate elements of stress from your life and deal with what can't be eliminated by deep breathing, self hypnosis, or meditation.
Avoid being trapped by negative thoughts and emotions. Turn them around. Focus on the positive.

That's pretty much the entire book. You don't actually need to read this book. You can skim it quite effectively. Keep in mind however that this author has an agenda. He wants you to have brain imaging and one may surmise he makes a wee profit when people do. He wants you to go to his website and probably pay a suitable fee for suggestions and games that you could almost certainly find on the web without paying. He wants you to have extensive blood work so that you will know precisely where you stand on any number of variables. Presumably this work will also come at a cost to you and a profit for him.

This author has been criticized by the medical community. Nevertheless, his basic mantra of diet, exercise, sleep, etc. is sound. However if you just go to his first set of bullet points you've pretty much got everything of value. And if you miss them at first he tends to repeat much the same things over and over and over. I believe that he could have reduced the entire book to about ten pages but then his publisher would have most certainly reacted poorly.

In summary, much of what this author says makes sense. It is not necessary to read the book word for word to obtain value and skimming is more than adequate. He has an agenda and he includes things that are overkill but it's easy to ignore them.



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