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Abby's Magazine - May/June 2015 | Page 41 • Core Exercises: Your body has 29 core muscles located mostly in your back, abdomen and pelvis. This group of muscles provides the foundation for movement throughout your entire body, and strengthening them can help protect and support your back, make your spine and body less prone to injury and help you gain greater balance and stability. Exercise programs like Pilates and yoga are great for strengthening your core muscles, as are specific exercises you can learn from a personal trainer. • Walking: While it is clearly better than doing nothing it is simply not a great exercise at all, although if done outdoors there are many other non-exercise benefits. So, unless you are morbidly obese or over 100 years old I don't think low intensity exercises like walking will really help you all that much. For those in that condition walking actually becomes a relatively high intensity exercise What Else You Can Do To Protect Your Brain Besides feeding your brain with exercise throughout your life, it's also vitally important to keep your brain engaged and to keep it fed with the kind of nutrients that help it thrive. You also want to keep your brain active and engaged, because the saying "use it or lose it" really does apply when it comes to keeping your brain fit. An example of keeping your brain engaged is reading a daily newspaper or doing a weekly crossword puzzle. Your brain is almost 60 percent fat, mostly in the form of DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and AA (arachidonic acid), so optimizing your omega-3 fats is another step you can take to optimize your brain health. Avoiding fructose, including high fructose corn syrup, also appears to be essential to promoting good brain health. As a standard recommendation, I strongly advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day. Your brain is meant to last you a lifetime, but it will degenerate and decay if you fail to take the proper steps to care for it. Getting enough exercise, keeping your brain active and protecting it from the wrong kinds of foods while feeding it the foods it thrives on should keep your brain active and healthy well into your senior years and help you avoid the now far too common "Western" brain diseases. A Heart- and Brain-Healthy Lifestyle Start taking action to preserve your brain function now by implementing the strategies detailed in the guide below. These strategies can also radically reduce your risk of all sorts of chronic diseases, so know that if you make the effort to enact these changes you will reap multiple health- and emotional benefits -- even as you get older. 1. Optimize your vitamin D with vitamin D supplements. 2. Eat a nutritious diet with plenty of raw fresh vegetables based on your nutritional type, and pay special attention to avoiding sugar. 3. Eat plenty of high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fats. Fifty percent of your brain is an omega-3 fat called DHA. 4. Avoid toxins, especially mercury, aluminum and fluoride. Dental amalgam fillings are one of the major sources of mercury, however you should be healthy prior to having them removed. (Be sure to only use a high-quality biologically trained dentist who is familiar with the removal of amalgam fillings or your health could get ruined.) Aluminum is found in items such as