My Unremarkable Brain

It’s official: the ketogenic diet has been ranked the #1 Worst Diet of 2018.  Whuuut?   This ranking, combined with the boom in its popularity — “keto” is one of the most-googled terms of the year  — has led to lots of fun and sensational headlines about this “dangerous” “fad” diet.   As I have mentioned , I’m part of a one-year study on the MAD (Modified Atkins Diet), which falls under the broad umbrella of ketogenic diets, so I read the US News report with interest. I have to say, the article itself is pretty fair.  The sections describing ketogenic diets — Overview, Health and Nutrition, Recipes, and Do’s and Don’ts — all jibe pretty well with my own experience.  Interestingly, they are all largely positive, touting the diet’s success in clinical trials for both weight loss and diabetes control, and citing several studies along the way.  So why the low ranking? The ranking is based in the final section, where experts express give it low marks in several categories

Last night I subjected Judy to schmaltzy Christmas Classic, It’s a Wonderful Life (what can I say, I’m a big ol’ softie at heart).  You know the one: Frank Capra’s fairy tale for middle-aged men, in which gee-willikers nice guy George Bailey is rescued from the brink of suicide when an angel shows what life would be like without him. What always impresses me, though, is that the plot above doesn’t happen until the last third of the movie.  The first hour and a half is spent on backstory: who is George Bailey, and how did he get so low?  Really, the movie is a 90-minute tragedy, followed by a 30-minute comedy.   It amazes me that Capra gets away with this — hard to imagine a director pulling it off today.  But the film only works because of that 90 minutes.  As, time and again, George defers his dreams of world travel and big-time success for other obligations, we feel his pain and frustration. It’s the tragic half of the movie that makes George so relatable. But if Georg

’Tis the season for TV Specials, which were always my absolute favorite viewing as a kid.  When that rainbow-colored “SPECIAL” popped up on the black screen, spinning through space to the time of drumbeats, my heart swelled with anticipation. So I was thrilled today when I discovered this 2015 blog post  by Dr. Georgia Ede, a holiday poem in the style of Dr. Seuss’s classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas .  A psychiatrist and researcher, Dr. Ede explores the connection between food and mental health, and she’s the author of one of my favorite quips on the topic: “Studies have shown conclusively that the head is part of the body.”  ( You can check out her talk here ).   In this post on her Diagnosis: Diet site, Dr. Ede writes a charming, Grinch -themed holiday poem about whether or not meat causes cancer.  Sounds crazy, right?  The connection is The World Health Organization (WHO), and their well-publicized 2015 report that called meat a carcinogen.  By now, the WHO’s advi

One of my favorite books this year was Dr. Robert Lustig’s The Hacking of the American Mind .   Reading it is the nonfiction equivalent of sitting in Mister Toad’s Wild Ride: you feel yourself swerving from biochemistry, through history, culture, and law, until finally landing on a dizzying quasi-conspiracy theory that explains why Americans are so depressed ,   overweight ,  addicted , and unhappy .  It’s crackin’ good fun! In the first part, Lustig works to define happiness.  Specifically, he wants to differentiate two facets: contentment and pleasure .  Thousands of years ago, Aristotle separated  eudaimonia — long-term contentment and well-being — from hedonia — temporary pleasure.  Lustig brings these definitions into the 21 st century using the MRI scans and neurochemistry.  He explains that pleasure (a new pair of jeans, a video game, a cup of coffee, a glass of wine), is associated with the production of dopamine, the so-called “seeking reward chemical” in the brai