Can What You Eat Today Decide Whether You Remember Tomorrow?

This article is based on my conversation with Annie Fenn, MD, author of the Brain Health Kitchen Substack and cookbook, this is day 2 of the first-ever Brain Health Substack Summit hosted by The Habit Healers.Click here to join tomorrow for Brain Health Substack Summit Day 3 with Jud Brewer MD PhD.If you missed Day 1 of our Brain Health Summit with Julie Fratantoni, PhD you can watch it here. We discussed how to exercise your brain day to day. Annie Fenn, MD is an OB/GYN turned culinary school graduate who lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She spent twenty years practicing medicine, the last ten focused on menopause, before leaving to pursue a lifelong dream of cooking. She came back to Jackson Hole and started teaching people how to make healthy food that actually tasted good.Then, around 2015, her mother was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment. It progressed to Alzheimer’s.Annie did what any doctor does when disease hits close to home. She went to the research. Not the surface-level stuff. The deep literature. She was looking for anything that could slow her mother’s progression, and what she found changed the direction of her entire career. There was a dietary pattern, backed by real studies, that appeared to protect the brain from developing Alzheimer’s in the first place. And for people with early dementia, there was evidence it could slow things down.That discovery became Brain Health Kitchen, first as a cooking school, then as a bestselling Brain Health Kitchen cookbook, and now as a Substack and worldwide community where Annie takes people on retreats to longevity hotspots around the globe. When she showed me her original copy of the book during our live conversation for Day 2 of the Brain Health Summit, it was held together by love and tape. She carries it everywhere. Her guests sign it.What she built from that research is something I think every person reading this needs to know about: a food pyramid designed specifically for the brain.Ten Rungs on a Different Kind of PyramidWhen Annie wrote her cookbook around 2021, she wanted to create brain-healthy eating guidelines that anyone could follow, regardless of whether they were vegan, Mediterranean, or somewhere in between. She drew from two dietary patterns with the strongest evidence for protecting the brain against dementia: the Mediterranean diet and the MIND diet (which stands for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay). Then she layered in newer research that neither of those original frameworks had included.The result is a food pyramid with ten brain-healthy food groups, and when Annie walked me through it during our conversation, a few things genuinely surprised me.Vegetables sit at the base. No surprise there. But what is surprising is the second rung: leafy greens, broken out as their own category. In most dietary guidelines, leafy greens get lumped in with other vegetables. The MIND diet pulled them out separately because the data warranted it. Studies showed that people who ate at least a cup of leafy greens per day had brains that looked 11 years younger on MRI scans.Eleven years. That is not a marginal benefit. That is a decade of aging you might be able to offset with a daily salad.Whole grains come next, though Annie is careful to point out that most people have the wrong picture in their head when they hear this term. She is not talking about hamburger buns, flour tortillas, or English muffins. None of those are whole grains. She means red rice, black rice, quinoa, millet, steel-cut oats, and breads where actual wheat is the first ingredient on the label. The distinction matters enormously, especially for people who carry the APOE4 gene variant (a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s), who may need to emphasize lower-glycemic options and lean harder on vegetables, legumes, and leafy greens instead.Berries hold their own rung because they are the only fruit singled out as an official brain-healthy food group. The data links berry consumption specifically to better performance on memory tests.Beans and legumes are next, and Annie pointed to something that I think is underappreciated: beans are one of the few food groups found on the table in virtually every blue zone on the planet, from Costa Rica to Okinawa to Sardinia. They contain a type of fiber that reaches the lower intestine, where many of the gut bacteria that influence brain health are waiting for nourishment. Most processed food never makes it that far. For people who believe they cannot tolerate beans, I suggested during our conversation that they start with lentils in small amounts, cooked well, and gradually increase from there before moving on to heartier beans. Annie built on that and got even more specific: start with red lentils in particular, the kind that fall apart when cooked. They are lower in fiber than other varieties, need no soaking, and tend to be the gentlest entry point for people rebuilding their tolerance.Nuts and ...