Keeping the Brain Limber

I finally got a chance to watch Dr. Neal Barnard's new PBS special, Protect Your Memory. A preview:


If you missed any of the showings on your local PBS stations, Amazon is now selling the DVD of the broadcast. This lecture is an off-shoot of his new book, Power Foods for the Brain which I purchased the day of release but it's still sitting in the ever-growing pile of health books to read.

In the video, he stated that there are three very important things we should be doing to ensure the health of our brain, and thus protecting our memories:

1) Skip bad fats
2) Knock out free radicals
3) Exercise your brain

To exercise your brain, he includes both physical, aerobic exercise, especially regular walking for 30 to 40 minutes three times a week, as well as exercises for your brain itself, such as learning new things, doing word and number puzzles like anagrams and Sudoku, even learning a language and being bilingual.

Well, I always hated anagrams and always get those questions wrong in Jeopardy, and Sudoku - ANY puzzle that involves numbers - just makes my head hurt. Learning languages? Well, in high school, the nun that taught us Spanish used the Castillian pronunciation of all the words so nothing we learned were we able to transfer to real-life usage. And the nun who taught us freshman Latin? She terrorized us all. She followed me into adulthood when, as an RN and working in a nursing home I was the primary caregiver of her mother, and she terrorized everyone in the Catholic Church-run nursing home just as she did high school girls. But I did love the language, and even won a few awards in competitions back in the 1960's. Knowing Latin really helped me in nursing school and when working with the doctors and even pharmacists. Eventually most of my Latin knowledge slipped away when I stopped working as a nurse and became a stay-at-home mom.

Fast forward a few years and I'm now home-schooling a sixth grader. We used a canned curriculum, and he was usually finished with all the required schoolwork by 10 am and I needed more work for him to do, something that would hold his interest. The curriculum focused on the Classics, so why not teach him a Classic language, and what's more Classic than Latin! Because home-schooling was starting to get popular, there were many resources out there, and I was able to get flashcards, workbooks, textbooks appropriate to his age group, even a few children's books written in Latin, like Winnie Ille Pu. We had fun doing the work together and he continued with Latin courses throughout high school, even taking a college level course when only 14. Knowing Latin helped his vocabulary greatly, so much so that it helped earn him a full-tuition scholarship to the state's engineering university and entrance into its Honor's College. He's proud of his vocabulary skills and is mocked incessantly by his friends for it, even now when they're all in their late 29's and early 30's. It's all in fun - all but one of them was also in the Honor's College in the same university, each in their own engineering major. The one in the bio-mechanical engineering program is now in med school and yes, he still laughs at my son's "very correct word usage," as he calls it, and has been known to IM him when writing papers to get his opinion on the wording of things.  


Back to Dr. Barnard and the brain. I think it's time to dust out the cobwebs in mine with something a little more challenging than matching games on Disney videos or nutrition books, so I dragged out the old English From the Roots Up cards my son made all those years ago and I signed up at the Latin Word A Day web site:

Learn more Latin »

Get this widget

I'll be adding this widget to the sidebar later.

I even dusted off my well-worn copy of the Winnie the Pooh book shown above.

Hopefully this will help prevent my brain from becoming Swiss cheese. There's no history of Alzheimer's in my own family, even though a lot on my mother's side lived into their late 80's, 90's and my great-grandmother and her sister both went over 100. But it exists on my husband's side. His mother started her Alzheimer's symptoms in her late 60's, and her sister, the aunt who just died from it last month, was lucky enough to not start until she was in her early 90's, but it ravaged her. By the time she died, she not only know who anyone was, where she was, when it was, but who she was. She forgot everything, including how to eat. She had forgotten a few years ago how to go to the bathroom and I was so grateful for adult diapers until she eventually needed a colostomy to go #2 (for another reason, not the Alzheimer's) and a catheter for #1 (this was because of the Alzheimer's. It was necessary for hygiene and infection control reasons.) I do NOT want either my husband or myself to wind up like that! Or our son, but he has many year to go to worry about that, but he wold be the one who would have to take care of us if we started to suffer from dementia. If following a healthy low-fat plant based diet, doing a few Leslie Sansone or Richard Simmons workouts and learning a few new vocabulary words a day will help prevent it, so be it!

Dr. Barnard on Dr. Oz

All segments together in one clip:

VeganMoFo Day 27 - More Apologies

Sorry for being such a bad MoFo'er, but this has been one of our craziest weeks ever (again). The elderly relative with Alzheimer's we care for from afar got lost coming home from church on Sunday, so now we're hustling to make sure she's safe. She's still refusing live-in help, refusing to allow a homemaker for more than a few 3 times a week, and in fact wants us to stop her visits entirely, still crying she wants us to move in with her, something we told her years ago will never happen because there's no way my husband can commute via public transportation to work (Only 1 bus, runs hourly, takes twice as long as his commute now, and doesn't run well in inclement weather and is canceled altogether when it snows because the trip goes down dangerous steep hills). We're making appointments for interviews at various assisted living facilities and nursing homes with Alzheimer's units in the area because we weren't too thrilled with the place she was in earlier this year, and so far either the people we have to talk to aren't in this week or won't even bother talking to us because there are no openings and long waiting lists.

I've also been arguing with one of the nurses from rehab. Because I'm not losing scads of weight even though I'm doing 60 minutes of cardio in front of official witnesses three times a week and another 45 to 60 minutes 3 more times at home in front of only my son, this nurse feels I just must be eating too much or eating the wrong foods. When I described the McDougall program to her she did nothing but bad-mouth it for a half hour, telling me it's not healthy to eliminate entire food groups, that I'm eating too few calories, need those "healthy" fats in my diet. Remember folks, this is a cardiac care nurse with not just her BSN and state nursing license but has multiple certifications in advanced nursing care, including critical cardiac care! I told her that my doctor, the cardiologist that runs the entire cardio-vascular unit, the guy the hospital BUILT the unit FOR a few years back, not only had heard of the McDougall program (As well as Dr. Esselstyn, Ornish and Barnard and C. Collin Campbell) but was very happy and said he wished he could get ALL his cardiac patients to follow the program. She didn't care - she still claimed it wasn't healthy. She said I should be going to a place like her 400+ pound sister is going to, one that makes an individualized food plan for each patient (her sister eats 3000 calories a day, minimum, about 1/3 each in fat, protein and carbs). No thanks. I'll stick with McDougall. It was because of McDougall my coronary arteries were clear as can be, with no cholesterol plaques or deposits, no blockages, when the cardiac cath was done. I doubt they would still be clear if I ate 1000 calories of fat every day. Maybe she just wanted to make sure I would *stay* a customer of the cardiac unit?

Food - Yesterday was . . . I really have to think what the heck we ate! Oh, my husband and I had a chili I tossed together (just canned beans, canned no-salt-added petite diced tomatoes, frozen corn kernels, and 2 packets of lower salt fajita mix), a dump and heat meal. Today is brown rice and veggies; tomorrow is potatoes and veggies (That Poorman's Meal I mentioned in the past). Thursday will be spaghetti and whatever (sausages, not-meat balls, or just some veggies tossed into the sauce - who knows?). Friday will be our traditional whole wheat, cheeseless pizza.

Saturday, Halloween, we have no idea what we're doing. We may be bringing that relative into a nursing home, rehab or even a hospital, or just at her house clearing out & painting a room in preparation for a live-in companion. I usually make a stew on Halloween and call it Witches' Brew, but I have a feeling that this year we'll eat something even more horrendous - leftovers!

ACK! My husband just got home and I guess he'll want his dinner. Hopefully I'll be checking in again tomorrow with a slightly better MoFo post.

VeganMoFo Day 13 - Sorry Again

Sorry, but no recipe again today as I've been too busy pulling my hair out dealing with a demented old lady (age 91 and has Alzheimer's) and the contractor she hired. She chased him off her property, even though *she* is the one who hired him 10 days ago when she saw him in the church parking lot with his truck - without telling us and for a job that was already done in May. This guy phones me, as it turned out a half hour before he even got to her house, to tell me she needs a whole new foundation (Huh? He's supposed to be laying tar in her driveway in the space between her driveway and the house because he said she complained that the water seeps into the house when it rains), then after he gets there she threatens to call the police on him because he won't leave her property and he tells me she won't let him do the job. I told him since *she* is the one who hired him and *she* is the homeowner (We had a fight with him over the weekend and even stopped payment on checks she gave him last Thursday), if she doesn't want him to do the work to just leave and not do it. He insisted my husband call him ASAP. When I called her back 10 minutes later she tells me he did put the tar down even before he called me. She stopped him when he tried do something to the foundation itself. She still has no memory of meeting him in church, hiring him, or even him being at her house last week putting down the driveway sealant (for the third time in 18 months. He's the third guy she hired on her own to do this job because she doesn't like having puddles in the driveway.) and her giving him 2 checks.

Isn't Alzheimer's Disease wonderful - NOT!

When my husband finally got out of his meeting at work and phoned the guy himself, he first denied calling me at all, then admitted he called once, then finally twice, but denied telling me she needed a new foundation, says he completed the job with no problem and only waved to the old lady, didn't even talk to her (Gee, then why did he call me from her kitchen phone and I heard her screaming at him to get out of her house in the background and he then handed the phone to her so I can talk to her to try calm her down?).

Now my husband has to meet this guy in a (well lit) drug store parking lot after work to pay him, instead of the guy mailing us the bill and us paying him back by mail, like they decided on when they spoke Saturday night. Our son (age 25 and a towering 6'1") is going with him, just to make sure things go quickly and legitimately and they get out of there as fast as possible.

And my cardiologist told me to avoid stressful situations. I don't even want to know what my blood pressure is about now.

When my guys get back from their rendezvous later we'll have rice and veggies for dinner with some cut up seitan.

As for last night's breast of tofu, the texture didn't feel much different from when I pressed it with my cast iron pans, so next time I'll let it press a bit longer. That rice flour coating does taste delicious, so texture didn't matter much.