The FastDay Forum

5:2 works for me because only two days a week do I have to count calories. I don't drink wine those two days, nor eat crackers with (blue) cheese, chocolate, most fruits or have breakfast on those days. On the other five days I do.

I combine 5:2 with low carbs and plenty of exercise but have been doing that for last three years. Still, my weight went down and up during those three years and only 5:2 has helped it to go down steadily. If I need to start taking supplements, check every label and never use shortcuts (which sometimes help to get dinner on the table on time in a busy household) then I am unlikely to persevere with it. Tonight I used a Marion's Green Curry kit to make a quick, tasty, low cal and filling meal but ate hardly any rice (the family did).

I like reading about this but my current way is working for me as it fits easily in our life.

No more précis from me as I have covered all the salient points now. Since reading it, I have cut back further on carbs and grains (to the extent I ate them anyway). Might be my imagination but my mind is sharper. Whether I would follow his protocol I'm not sure as it's very strict but I agree with @gillymary, grains and sugar make me tired and cranky. So basically he is advocating the Mediterranean diet without the whole grains which IMHO is tasty and already well known for its benefits.

His talk 'brainchange" is being aired in the US this coming Thursday. If anyone watches it, please let us know what you think.

I am going to look into it seriously next year but have to say @Wmr309 fruits blue cheese and crackers chocolate and wine all yum when I can have them. I think with some clever substitutions my gut might be happier, I will be doing m brain a favour. I also figure for me nothing ventured nothing gained. I also do understand @Manderley too. Maybe I will work out my own version of a different substitute for grain like linseed and other flours. It will be the energy thing which will need to be watched I think

I am going to look into it seriously next year but have to say @Wmr309 fruits blue cheese and crackers chocolate and wine all yum when I can have them. I think with some clever substitutions my gut might be happier, I will be doing m brain a favour. I also figure for me nothing ventured nothing gained. I also do understand @Manderley too. Maybe I will work out my own version of a different substitute for grain like linseed and other flours. It will be the energy thing which will need to be watched I think

Sorry, I'd forgotten to add a word, making it sound like I never eat those. On the contrary, I love them and eat them regularly, so I could not follow Dr Perlmutter's diet. Sorry about the confusion!

interesting reading all the posts, thanks, everyone. I read Grain Brain and it makes sense. It's scary to know we can be eating in a way that is harming our brain that will show up later as disease. I think the examples and studies Perlmutter shares make sense. I was especially interested in reading that even normal glucose readings may be harmful to the brain. it makes sense to eat carefully now to avoid problems later. I enjoy the foods suggested and feel pretty good doing it.

Interesting review of Grain Brain in the Atlantic: This is your brain on gluten

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi ... en/282550/

The law of good science is that you can’t say “I’ve got an idea and I’m going to fall in love with it and selectively cite evidence to support it.”

“I also find it sad that because his book is filled with a whole bunch of nonsense, that’s why it’s a bestseller; that’s why we’re talking."

“You’re only being a good scientist,” Katz said, “if you say, ‘I’m going to try to read the literature in as unbiased a manner as I possibly can, see where it leads me, and then offer the advice that I have based on that view from an altitude.’ I don’t see that going on here, and again, I think it’s kind of sad because I think the public is being misled.”

“I also find it sad that because his book is filled with a whole bunch of nonsense, that’s why it’s a bestseller; that’s why we’re talking. Because that’s how you get on the bestseller list. You promise the moon and stars, you say everything you heard before was wrong, and you blame everything on one thing. You get a scapegoat; it’s classic. Atkins made a fortune with that formula. We’ve got Rob Lustig saying it’s all fructose; we’ve got T. Colin Campbell [author of The China Study, a formerly bestselling book] saying it’s all animal food; we now have Perlmutter saying it’s all grain. There’s either a scapegoat or a silver bullet in almost every bestselling diet book.”

This is the crux for me (along with the references to the carb intake of the Blue Zone longevity areas and such):

When a person advocates radical change on the order of eliminating one of the three macronutrient groups from our diets, the burden of proof should be enormous. Everything you know is not wrong. Perlmutter has interesting ideas that I would love to believe. I’d love it if a diet could deliver all that he promises. There is value in belief. It's what the Empowering Neurologist literally markets. His narrative comes with the certainty that you are doing something to save yourself from cognitive decline and mental illness, which are probably the most unsettling of disease prospects.

With that belief can also come guilt and blame; an idea that something simple could’ve been done to prevent a mental illness, when actually it was bigger than us. To think that every time you eat any kind of carb or gluten, you are putting your mental health and cognitive faculties at risk is, to me, less empowering than paralyzing.

Grain elimination is not cutting out one of the three macronutrients. There are carbs in vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts and seeds. I am trialling grain elimination, and do not miss them. I know people who have benefited from big reductions in joint pains and improved mobility by doing so. Of course you don't get feedback from your body like this in a few months with something like dementia, so if you are doing any dietary changes in the hope of avoiding dementia years down the line then there is a kind of faith aspect to it. I treat it like Pascal' s wager, if it turns out not to have prevented dementia in my case, then what will I have lost? Grains are not an essential part of the human diet, ubiquitous as they now are.

Dementia is much more strongly linked to higher than normal blood sugars than to grain allergies (which only a small proportion of the population actually have.)

Where things get confusing is that in the old days (back in the 1990s when I started eating a ketogenic diet) if you went gluten free you eliminated a huge amount of the starchy sugary foods that raise blood sugar. But now with the gluten free fad in full bloom, there are high sugar/ high starch replacements for all the gluten foods, many of which are made up much faster carbs than many breads and pastas.

So it is now possible to be gluten free and eating a diet guaranteed to raise your blood sugar to unhealthy heights. But the research showing advantages to going grain free is mostly from the era when eliminating gluten meant cutting way down on carbs.

@peebles. When I read Grain Brain, he seemed to acknowledge Lustig's research and I concluded that grain was a contributory factor but the real issue was sugars. I think we are aligned, but just wanted to say that I don't think his book was just about grains - so a misleading title!

@rawkaren , Good to hear that he's getting that message across! His publishers probably emphasized the grain thing because Dr. Davis made a fortune with Wheat Belly.

Thanks for that Atlantic link Ssure! My feeling is that for most people, whole grains are no problem at all and can be an important part of a well-balanced diet. Why is so much discussion in the world of diet and nutrition such nonsense. There is so much misinformation, biased information, etc. out there it's hard to know what to believe. For now I'm sticking with Pollan's advice: eat real food, not too much, mostly plants.

Edit to add: I don't mean to downplay at all the seriousness of wheat sensitivity/allergy even in some non-celiacs.

My brother read this book sometime ago and was quoting it as the bible. However when I researched this bloke, he had patients sue him for incompetence, or some such thing. Got me thinking that anyone could write anything. But the bottom line for me is like some of you others, do I want to live sparky to 100 with no wine, no bread, no cake, hell no! If I felt significantly better I might dump the wheat (rarely eat pasta, spuds, rice I don't like, hardly eat fruit), but eating fat and vegies and eggs, nothing else seems like a long existence. You wouldnt need to fast, you'd be stick thin.