In book titled Your Brain on Food, which is written by Gary L. Wenk, talks about how the many different neurotransmitters and food in our everyday diet affect our brain. Throughout this whole book, Wenk expands on the concept that he explains by bringing up different instances that he himself has experienced, or past examples in history. He is successful in creating a compelling book that is both engaging and informative. The main point that Wenk argues in his writing is that the brain is an advanced organ in our body that can constantly become affected by our many foods in our diet. Because of this people need to eat less food since food in volumes because too much of anything never has positive health effects in our body for the long run, which can cause long lasting effects.
In the book, Wenk brings up lots of different drugs and neurotransmitters that each affect the brain in its own unique way. Throughout the whole book he explains how the drugs affect the brain and how nowadays scientists are able to change the chemical components of drugs to enable them to be more effective by making them more lipid soluble, allowing them to pass through the blood-brain barrier with much more ease. This scientific breakthrough allows drugs to have a much more potent effect on the body than the original drug would: “morphine, for example, became far more lipid-soluble and far more euphorigenic (i.e., pleasure-inducing) when scientists added two acetyl groups to it to produce heroin at the turn of the 19th century. Much later, amphetamine was similarly modified to make it more euphorigenic and therefore more addicting” (Wenk 58). This displays how this minor alteration of adding methyl groups completely changes the chemical structure of the drug, allowing it to become more addicting and have a greater effect on the user. This exhibits how people need to definitely be weary about what they take and the amount that they use because many drugs today are able to have a greater impact in the brain because of their new lipid solubility. Another example of this changing structure is the formation of ecstasy, which can have many adverse effects. Wenk describes how some of them include, “a dramatic rise in body temperature, or hyperthermia”(59). This depicts the serious consequences of taking such a potent drug such as ecstasy; Wenk warns readers to take caution in these warnings. Another drug, cocaine, is also described in this book. The author again warns readers about the negative side effects of this drug in large quantities through his in depth explanations and descriptions of what could happen: “excessive, long-term, intravenous use of cocaine tends to produce especially severe rebound phenomena, including psychotic behaviors together with delusions of grandeur and hallucinations” (72). This caution supports Wenk’s ongoing message to readers about staying smart about choices they make and to always take things in small quantities. His warnings allow readers to understand the dangerous possibilities of these drugs. Wenk later goes on in the book to talk about an everyday drug, caffeine, but more specifically coffee. While in small amounts it can have its benefits, coffee is able to affect people in different ways. A person that is extremely tired and drowsy will feel more alert after a cup of coffee, while a person that is well rested would not get that same effect. He explains how the coffee itself can have positive health benefits such as being, “a rich source of antioxidants caffeic, chlorogenic, coumaric, ferulic, and sinapic acids and silverskin… coffee drinking has been associated with a significantly lowered risk of developing Parkinson’s disease… moderate coffee-drinking of about two to three cups each day might reduce your chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease” (125-126). This displays how coffee does indeed have its own benefits, but in large quantities it is not good, as revealed through one of his students, where the student, “finished off the entire container of 32 packets [of instant coffee right out of the box]... three days later, he stopped having explosive diarrhea and finally fell asleep completely exhausted” (127). This is a strong example of how anything in large quantities is not good for you, which is what Wenk is able to argue for throughout this whole book.
This book relates to what we have learned in class because it is all about the brain and some of the nervous system. This book explains how the blood brain barrier, which we have learned about in class, only allows lipid soluble hormones to cross, so water soluble hormones are unable to get through. This goes further into what we learned in our brain unit because we learned about all three of these concepts, but never exactly went into detail about what is able to pass through the blood brain barrier. This book also discusses action potentials, which is how neurons pass a signal down to each other. It went into detail about how that signal can become disrupted through different drugs. One main theme that was prevalent in this book that is similar to what we learned in class is the idea of simply eating healthy and getting a moderate amount of exercise. Wenk explains in his book that our body’s daily routine of metabolizing food is actually what causes our body to grow old. Because of this, people need to take care of themselves to last longer by exercising and eating the right foods. If I had the opportunity to ask this author two questions one would be how did all of these people in the past know so much about drugs? Were some lethal plants just common knowledge back in Shakespeare’s time? The other question would be why do some people get the “munchies” (102) after taking marijuana?
I think that the credibility of this author is very high; however, the credibility of this material at this time may not be that great. I am sure that back when it was first released it was extremely credible, but that was seven years ago; lots of things can change in seven years. This author is a professor at The Ohio State University in the Departments of Psychology and Neuroscience and Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics. He also has a PhD. I believe that the ideas explained in this book are very realistic. For example, Wenk explains how the placebo effect can cause many people to believe that they feel better, when in actuality they made themselves better by believing that some medicine healed them. I believe this is very real because I myself have experienced it and he explained some experiments that were done to test it out. He also explains how drugs that are more lipid soluble do not make your brain smarter, it simply works faster. He used a good analogy with a computer, explaining how newer computers are not any more smart than they were before; they just work much faster. This is how drugs work as well. It allows people to think quicker, which can sometimes seem as though they are smarter when they really are not. He then went on to explain that people that tap their fingers fast while thinking naturally think faster. I liked this idea because it made a lot of sense to me once he explained it. Also, I found it interesting that finger tapping correlates with the speed of a person’s thought process. The implications of this work are to inform the public about different drugs and how they affect the body. Wenk gets this and the message to take caution and use small amounts of everything across in his writing. This is not theoretical because Wenk describes many different experiments that have been performed to test these facts. This benefits individuals because it allows them to understand what is actually happening to them when they take a certain type of drug, and what some side-effects could be.
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