Completion is an ambiguous arena to navigate. Creative projects rarely feel done. Eat to Beat Alzheimer’s, a fairly small book, tapped into a place inside of me that had so much to say! It was while working on Eat to Beat that I realized this book was a beginning for me, not the whole. I couldn’t burden one book with all that I had to share. It was important to stay clear on what this cookbook was meant to be: an educational text for learning about nutrition and brain health with recipes to put that learning into action!

Baby boomers are the generation born between 1946 and 1964.  This puts them in an age range of 52 – 70 years old in 2016.  While standards of aging are changing for the better and in general, people are able to live longer, healthier lives, baby boomers do have a unique set of health challenges.

We are in the midst of a great paradigm shift. Our understanding of health and the root cause of disease is expanding. While health concerns, issues and illnesses are extremely difficult for the individual and the community, they also offer us a particular leverage point for looking more closely at the human body.

Our diets have a significant effect on the health of our brains, which will potentially affect all areas of functioning. Alzheimer’s and dementia are only two examples of how compromised brain health can manifest. Depression and anxiety are other manifestations that are even more common and can be just as debilitating.

Nurturance has always been something I’ve looked for. I think I have traveled along a path that many would be familiar with. I looked for nurturance in other people to give me the love and kindness I craved. I looked for nurturance in fad diets to get the results physically that I wanted, as an athlete to be fit and strong, and also as a woman, to be healthy and attractive. I spent a long time looking for this outside of myself and thought there were people and times when things appeared to line up, but nothing was ultimately sustainable for me.

My health continued to decline, even though I felt I was doing everything right, based on the information I was getting at the time. This led me to investigate deeper, both nutritional science, and my own psychology. I kept stumbling across an interface between the two, that I wasn’t seeing talked about, but from my perspective was significant. That is when I first started to draw the line between food and mood, which is really another way of describing brain health.