There’s a good reason why Asians who consume lots of curries retain sharp mental function and little cognitive decline with age. It’s turmeric, the spice that gives curries their golden color. More specifically, it’s the curcumin found in turmeric. The best way to maintain a healthy, highly functional brain is to prevent out-of-control brain oxidation (“brain rust”) and its partner in crime, brain inflammation (“brain on fire”). And one of the best supplements you can take to do this is curcumin, an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory that is uniquely beneficial to the brain. A recent double-blind, placebo-controlled trial done at UCLA found that when older adults with mild memory complaints were given just 180 milligrams of curcumin a day for a year and a half, they significantly improved their performance on memory and attention tests, enhanced their mood, and had less amyloid and tau (associated with Alzheimer’s disease) in the parts of their brains that control memory and…

"Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food." - Hippocrates Do your meals leave you feeling light and full of vitality, or do they weigh you down, making you feel sleepy and dull? Although all food supplies calories, how well your body utilizes those calories to provide you with energy depends on the "life force" in the foods you eat. And foods vary widely along a continuum in this respect, from producing vitality, rejuvenation and healing to sapping your energy, adding unwanted weight and contributing to premature aging and disease.Food also influences mood and mental abilities, from raising your spirits, making you optimistic and heightening your awareness and mental function to bringing you down and dulling your brain.A number of factors determine a food's vibration or life force. Overall, foods are most energizing and health-promoting when they're consumed raw, or as close as possible to their natural state. This gives pride of place to the multicolored fruits and vegetable…

Would you like to be smarter? Of course, you would! Who wouldn’t want to be able to bring laser-like attention to the task at hand, assess all the elements in a situation quickly, analyze how they interrelate, and remain wholeheartedly engaged and absorbed until any problem is solved creatively and effectively?Well, vitamin C supplementation can help with that, especially if you’re at all deficient — and most of us are!Recently, Korean scientists assembled a group of 241 healthy, young (ages 20-39) adults to see if their serum vitamin C levels correlated with their “mental vitality.” Indeed, it did. So the researchers went a step further. About half of these young Korean men and women had “inadequate” levels of the vitamin, which the researchers defined as being less than 0.88 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL). Fifty of these vitamin C-insufficient subjects were invited to participate in a four-week experiment. Half of them took 500 mg of vitamin C twice a day, fo…