The Care and Feeding of Your Brain

The Care and Feeding of Your Brain

A Q&A with Kathie Madonna Swift

Kathie Madonna Swift, RDN, is a registered dietitian nutritionist working in the field of integrative and holistic nutrition. A Healthy Living faculty member at Kripalu and a pioneer in the Food As Medicine culinary nutrition movement, she is author of The Swift Diet: 4 Weeks to Mend the Belly, Lose the Weight and Get Rid of the Bloat and The Inside Tract: Your Good Gut Guide to Great Digestive Health. We asked her for the inside track on nutrition for optimal brain health, the subject of this spring’s Food As Medicine seminar at Kripalu.
Q What exactly is brain health? How do you know if your brain is healthy?
A The brain weighs approximately three pounds. It’s 60 percent fat and it uses 20 percent of our body’s fuel. It’s the command center of the body. When you’re in a state of optimal functioning, the brain is processing new information, accessing memories, focusing, making decisions, and experiencing emotions. When the brain is less healthy, that’s when you get everything from mood disorders and memory loss to addiction and neurodegenerative disease.
In recent years, research has uncovered a powerful brain-belly connection. Dr. Michael Gershon coined the phrase “the second brain” to refer to the enteric nervous system in the gut, which manages digestion with its own network of neurotransmitters. It’s fascinating to me that what happens in the brain can directly affect the gut, and vice versa. So maintaining a healthy microbiota (microbe collection) in the gut is key to brain health.