David Perlmutter - Brain Wash

Shove shit up your butt.

That's the first thing Dr. Perlmutter taught me in Brain Maker. He'd risen to fame with his breakout book Grain Brain and moved on to the microbiome and fecal matter transplants to fix what ails you. His research on the brain-bowel connection inspired my story of a kid whose synesthetic disassociative alter ego convinces him microbiota transfer is the surest way to cure severe autism. Fiction based in fact, the best and only kind.

In his latest book Brain Wash, Perlmutter uses breakthroughs to show what we already know. Modern society is not so slowly killing us. Social media's put our feedback loop of immediate gratification into overdrive, pumping a before unseen amount of disease-causing cortisol through our veins.

His recommendations are the recommendations you'd expect. Consistent sleep, fasting, exercise and meditation, sprinkled with intermittent reflection and cognitive engagement. It's footnoted with a Brain Wash boot camp necessary only to those who will never seek it out.

It's not formative like his first expose on wheat's role in earth's demise, nor profound like his second on how regimented ingestion of particular strains of bifidobacterium and lactobacillus have the power to turn diabetes- and autism-causing genes off, but it does encapsulate most of what we should be doing into one prescriptive page-turner.

In a butshell, exercise fertilizes the brain with the growth factor BDNF. 6 cylces of stage 4 delta wave daily sleep strengthens the shuttling of hippocampus-based short term memories into the long-term neocortex. Meditation dampens the brain's default network that lets the body slough off dead senescent cells and decelerate life-ending telomere attrition. Pro- and prebiotic dieting plus caloric restriction plus shorter refeed windows tip the gut's constant bacteroides/firmicutes battle into a ratio that shushes genetic markers for cancer and autoimmune disorders.

Anyways, this is all clearly just a [butt] plug to encourage people to read my shitty story Vencer From Holland, a piece that earned me a lifelong submission ban to the Faulkner Literary Competition, but is still forever available on my website.