Kind of a dearth of facts here... "The biggest reason is by only fueling your body with shit, you’re also fueling your brain with shit" I'd like to see some kind of evidence to support that.
I'd be all for preparing the meal he suggests, but with shopping, prep, cooking, and cleanup it's a significant time investment compared to pizza so I'd like evidence it's doing my startup better.
Anecdotal only, but a friend of mine put himself in the hospital once by eating crap for months. It was the first time he was the primary numbers guy on a multi million dollar deal and basically didn't leave the office for months. His meals consisted of soda and vending machine snacks.
He ended up with some organ issues that put him in the hospital for a little while and when he got out he had to take it easy for awhile.
Unless you're starving, your brain pretty much only runs only on glucose. That means that whatever you eat, good/bad fresh/packaged, whatever, just gets converted to glucose.
Assuming you're getting basic levels of required vitamins, I don't see any reason why one diet would be beneficial over another in terms of brain performance.
Glucose isn't the problem, glucose regulation is. If you eat refined carbs or sugars you get slammed with it all at once, and your body becomes more insulin resistant and fat-generating as a defense mechanism. Meanwhile, you run into the "blood sugar rollercoaster" effect - a high, followed by a crash causing extreme hunger. The blood sugar shenanigans have the side effect of manipulating blood pressure as well, which can make some activities difficult or dangerous.
When you eat fats, proteins and slower-digesting carbs the glucose regulation problem doesn't occur, at least not on the same scale, so your brain and body can perform undistributed for potentially many, many hours. Consequently the only problems come from nutritional content and digestive efficiency.
For elite endurance athletes there is still reason to "carb up" to pump as much glyogen into the muscles as possible, but that isn't most of us, and it isn't something you need for brain work.
right. lets run a case study. go buy yourself a 50lb bag of sugar, a years supply of multivitamins, and report back in a year with how that worked out for you.
Well as a college student who went on a 2 month coco pebble binge (and only ate that because of sheer laziness), I didn't feel significant effects on brain power. But it does trash your body and leaves you feeling lethargic and lose motivation to actually do anything productive. I think the latter effects are just as dangerous as reduced "brain effectiveness". (this is just my experience, certainly not any scientifically proven study)
I didn't make the original claim, so I don't see why it would be my job to prove or disprove it.
That's sort of beside the point though. I'm just tired of the ridiculous amount of misinformation in the diet, nutrition, and exercise fields. It's not like there isn't a long history of claims that are "just common sense" turning out completely wrong ("eating fat makes you fat", "eating high cholesterol food gives you high cholesterol" (mostly genetics), "diet and exercise are equally important to losing weight" (reality is that it's mostly diet), etc.)
Bottom line, if you're going to make a claim that certain food improve your brain's performance, you should have just a shred of evidence.
i'd assumed you were trolling, hence the flippant response. i dont think all statements need to be supported with citations. there's a certain amount of knowledge that at some point has to be considered common sense. wiping your ass is one. not fueling your body with trash is another. i can understand your position of frustration at mis-information and pseudo-science, and appreciate a fellow critical thinker, but i do think it's important to choose your battles, and i do not think that this issue is one that's worth discussing much further, considering the overwhelming amount of data out there. vis a vis. et al. lorem ipsum.
The process converting these things to glucose, and some of the other ingredients in this food, result in all sorts of chemicals being released into your body. (not bad -- vitamins are chemicals... etc). These in turn affect how the body operates. Depending on how the body is operating, various other chemicals, such as hormones are released -- creating various brain reactions -- and since the brain is affected, presumably this means the brain is affected. (Yes it's a tautology -- done for effect).
This doesn't even include the fact that some things in food directly affect the brain, such as caffeine.
Yes, a lot of things are stated from "common sense", but that doesn't mean they are true ("Reading in the dark will make your eye sight bad", "Going out without a coat will make you sick", etc...).
I grew up eating nothing but TV dinners and ramen, in college I added pizza and fast food to the mix. Since I've gotten married I eat regular healthy meals. Anecdotally, I don't notice any difference in my brain function, but I do weigh 40 pounds more then college :)
Yes, it is more expensive than $0.25 per meal eating ramen noodles but it uses even less time than cooking the ramen and you can eat while you keep working easier.
Do startups require anything remotely near peak mental fitness? It's oft debated here, but i'm pretty sure the consensus is talent and intelligence isn't that big of a deal. it's commitment.
To put it another way, how many startups that depend on doing original research get funded? I (perhaps foolishly) believe startups bring technology to the masses, but only after research shows it can be done.
I guess another argument would be, if you were to invest in a company, would you tie your investment to the founders to sleeping a minimum number of hours? Lack of sleep is easily as detrimental to mental fitness as poor diet.
This is actually a good line of thinking. Although you feel your best and think the clearest when you've kept near-perfect sleep and nutrition hygene, sometimes you need a different bag of emotions to get an idea. That could mean fasting, sleep deprivation, alcohol, caffeine, smoking...
However, not knowing which one is useful to you at any time, it's hard to know which is the most effective for work. But being mostly sober/mostly healthy is known to be the best (long-term) for staying alive and well, and startups are, on a human scale, a long-term game. You don't make $1,000,000 because you stayed up all night to ship.
Here's (http://www.dana.org/news/brainhealth/detail.aspx?id=9854) an excellent article, but I'd think it'd be pretty common-sense that you cannot live on starches and fats alone. Your body does actually use vitamins, fiber and different types of fats (monounsaturated is one you might not find in pizza, for instance) to function. Your brain requires them as well.
The specifics are easily found on Google–go for it. The article I linked has some good information as well.
-- body does actually use vitamins, fiber [...] Your brain requires them as well --
Just nitpicking here - by definition fiber is 'the indigestible parts of plant food'(1). So even if it can possibly be said that the body uses fiber - it is probably used in some non-nutritious way - we can be certain that the fiber does not reach the brain.
I'd be all for preparing the meal he suggests, but with shopping, prep, cooking, and cleanup it's a significant time investment compared to pizza so I'd like evidence it's doing my startup better.