humor. Did her promise hold true? Let’s just say I remain a
picky eater.)
A few years later, we were on vacation in south Florida,
which is where many New Yorkers retreat to in order to
escape the winter cold. It was there that I had my first taste
of another food: coconut. I instantly fell in love with the rich
texture, subtle sweetness, and tropical flavor. At the ripe old
age of twelve, I understood in that moment why New
Yorkers liked Florida so much—the coconuts! But that affair
too was cut tragically short when my mom told me that
coconut meat was unhealthy. “It’s rich in saturated fat,
which is bad for the heart.”
In this chapter, we’re going to take a swan dive into all
things vascular health. Why a whole chapter dedicated to
blood vessels in a book about the brain? Because the health
of your veins and arteries affects more than just the heart
and your potential for heart disease. The brain is fed
nutrients, energy, and oxygen by a power grid of an
estimated four hundred miles of microvasculature. Any
outage along this network (leading to reduced blood flow to
the brain) not only contributes to cognitive impairment,
increasing risk for both Alzheimer’s disease and vascular
dementia, but can also produce the subtler deficits in
cognitive function that we typically associate with aging.^1
And, really, who wants that?
The Diet-Heart Debacle
Today we’re armed with a much deeper understanding of