5 Brain Healthy Things I'm Into This Winter

Including my recipe for the Coffee Berry Smoothie

Hello, brain health ambassadors! It’s what we call Deep Winter where I live here in the Tetons, the time from January to February when temperatures can dip below zero for weeks at a time. It’s a cozy, nesting time of year with lots of cooking, reading by the fire, and yes, more time watching Netflix.

Here’s what I’ve been into this Deep Winter:

If you find it difficult to get your daily serving of berries in the winter, I have a recipe to help you out with that. Plus, the seed mix that is my new obsession, my latest Netflix binge, and a handy downloadable MIND diet score chart. Read on for more, plus a special discount code for BHK paying subscribers.

1. You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment on Netflix.

When the results of the Twin Study came out this year, it fueled the ongoing heated debate between vegans and meat-eaters about the best way to eat. Now some nutrition tribes are calling the study biased. In the study, Stanford researchers measured cardiometabolic biomarkers in identical twins placed on either a vegan or omnivorous diet for 8 weeks. It features Dr. Christopher Gardner, a nutrition researcher and friend I’ve met through my work here. Which twins fared better, based on weight, LDL-C, blood sugar and more? You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the vegan participants were overall more metabolically healthy in just 2 months. I highly recommend reading the paper and watching how this Netflix series brings the study to life. In a few weeks, let’s discuss! I’ll share my take on what it teaches us about brain health and address the issue of bias. And I’d love to hear your takeaways, too. Plus, I’ll introduce you to Dr. Gardner, lead researcher and accomplished vegetarian cook, through a recipe he’ll be sharing with BHK.

2. Simply Seeds Salad Topper.

When I first dove into this jumbo jar of seeds, it was love at first taste. This crunchy, clumpy spice and seed mix includes some of my favorite nutrient-dense brain-healthy seeds, like pumpkin, sesame, and fennel. Plus, there’s subtle spice from lemony Aleppo pepper and coriander seeds, all bound with a light touch of maple syrup. Think of it as a savory, grain-free granola that’s just as good tossed into a green salad as it is sprinkled on yogurt and berries. I also love it on my Creamy Black Bean Soup, sprinkled on cottage cheese, or even broiled grapefruit halves. The Simply Seeds people were kind enough to give me a discount code for paying BHK subscribers.