The A.I. Diet ,,,Forget government-issued food pyramids. Let an algorithm tell you how to eat … according to Dr. Eric Topol (cardiologist) for the Opinion Section of The New York Times, 2 March 2019. 

Despite decades of diet fads and government-issued food pyramids, we know surprisingly little about the science of nutrition. It is very hard to do high-quality randomized trials: They require people to adhere to a diet for years before there can be any assessment of significant health outcomes. The largest ever — which found that the “Mediterranean diet” lowered the risk for heart attacks and strokes — had to be retracted and republished with softened conclusions. Most studies are observational, relying on food diaries or the shaky memories of participants. There are many such studies, with over a hundred thousand people assessed for carbohydrate consumption, or fiber, salt or artificial sweeteners, and the best we can say is that there might be an association, not anything about cause and effect. Perhaps not surprisingly, these studies have serially contradicted one another. Meanwhile, the field has been undermined by the food industry, which tries to exert influence over the research it funds.

Now the central flaw in the whole premise is becoming clear: the idea that there is one optimal diet for all people.Only recently, with the ability to analyze large data sets using artificial intelligence, have we learned how simplistic and naïve the assumption of a universal diet is. It is both biologically and physiologically implausible: It contradicts the remarkable heterogeneity of human metabolism, microbiome and environment, to name just a few of the dimensions that make each of us unique. A good diet, it turns out, has to be individualized.

We’re still a long way from knowing what this means in practice, however. A number of companies have been marketing “nutrigenomics,” or the idea that a DNA test can provide guidance for what foods you should eat. For a fee, they’ll sample your saliva and provide a rudimentary panel of some of the letters of your genome, but they don’t have the data to back their theory up.

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How eating more fat can improve your memory – The ketogenic diet is about much more than weight loss, according to Maria ACross, MSc for Medium | Feed Your Brain, 5 June 2018.  Please remember, this is not a recommendation, simply information.

Your brain is the most advanced, sophisticated nerve center on the planet. Or — depending on how you look at it — a crinkly lump of fat, housed within your skull. Either way, it is the accumulation of millions of years of human evolutionary biology. No other organ contains so much fat, or needs it so much. Without it, the brain simply cannot function. Memory loss is one sign of that.

The dry weight of the brain is 60% fat. It’s all there: saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat. There’s also a good deal of cholesterol, a fat-like substance. As well as forming part of the structure of the brain, and providing fuel, these fats play a role in maintaining memory and other aspects of cognitive function. By the same token, lack of the right fats plays a role in cognitive dysfunction, including poor memory and ultimately dementia.

Perhaps that’s why fat is so appealing. “Fat gives food flavor”, as chef and TV personality Julia Child once famously put it. Fat is filling, and instantly lights up your brain’s reward centers.

In 2012, the journal Neurobiology of Aging published the results of a study into the effects of a very low carbohydrate diet on memory loss. The 23 participants, who were elderly and all had MCI, were given either a very high or a very low carbohydrate diet for six weeks. At the end of the trial period, improved verbal memory performance was observed in the low carbohydrate group, but not in those following the high carbohydrate diet. The low carbohydrate, ketogenic group also experienced reductions in weight and waist circumference.

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Bears that eat ‘junk food’ may hibernate less and age faster was reported by Susan Milius for ScienceNews.org, 4 March 2019. Wildlife raiding human foods might risk faster cellular aging!

The more sugary, highly processed foods that 30 female black bears scrounged from humans, the less time the bears were likely to spend hibernating, researchers found. In turn, bears that hibernated less tended to score worse on a test for aging at the cellular level, wildlife ecologist Rebecca Kirby and her colleagues conclude February 21 in Scientific Reports.

The new research grew out of an earlier project to see what wild black bears across Colorado were eating, says study coauthor Jonathan Pauli, a community ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Kirby, his Ph.D. student at the time, checked diets from hundreds of bears across the state.When bears eat more processed foods, their tissue picks up higher concentrations of a stable form of carbon called carbon-13. That extra carbon comes from plants such as corn and cane sugar. Studies in smaller hibernating mammals hint that these seasonal metabolic slowdowns might delay the ravages of aging. If that’s true, shortening hibernation bouts might have a downside for the bears.

Lesson:  Eating junk food can make you age faster! 

Read more: Bears that eat ‘junk food’ may hibernate less and age faster