I know what you’re thinking. You think this 2005 (in paperback) book, The Edge Effect: Achieve Total Health And Longevity With The Balanced Brain Advantage (which promises on the front cover to 'Reverse Or Prevent Alzheimer’s, Aging, Memory Loss, Weight Gain, Sexual Dysfunction And More') will be about drugs, the prescription, non-prescription and herbal kinds. How else can one achieve peak performance, after all? This then leads you to think it’s just another gimmick and way for the author to get noticed and make money. Like me you have a lot to learn from the author, Dr. Eric Braverman.

Let me introduce the doctor with this from pathmed.com because my paperback copy has no Author Bio given:

Dr. Braverman is one of the foremost experts in Integrative Medicine - the combination of Conventional, Alternative, and Holistic therapies recognized as the paradigm for the 21st Century. He views every patient as a whole, with recognition of the brain's global impact on illness and health. (pathmed.com)

More specifically this from amazon.com where The Edge Effect is sold:

Eric R. Braverman, M.D., is the Director of the Place for Achieving Total Health (PATH Medical), located in New York City. Dr. Braverman received his B.A. summa cum laude from Brandeis University and his M.D. with honors from New York University Medical School., after which he did postgraduate work in internal medicine with a Yale Medical School affiliate in Greenwich, Connecticut. Dr. Braverman has published more than eighty research papers with many colleagues. He is also the coauthor of several books, including Zinc and Other Micro-Nutrients, Male Sexual Fitness, and Hypertension and Nutrition.

You might have heard of the brain’s neurotransmitter serotonin, that feel good chemical that is enhanced by Prozac and taken by millions. This book discusses all four neurotransmitters, each with their own part or lobe of our brain: dopamine, acetylcholine, GABA and serotonin. We are born with a dominant neurotransmitter and that never changes, but we may become deficient or too sufficient in it. The other three are also very important because they work together as a team to provide us our health, so deficiencies must be addressed if we want to prevent or reverse the health consequences.

Braverman’s entire 25-year career has been focused on human brain health and his patients and us have reaped the remarkable benefits. What he does in his office is take a picture of your brain with the BEAM, the Brain Electrical Activity Map developed by Harvard Medical School researchers in the 80s and illustrated and explained in the back of the book. It shows how balanced and imbalanced we can be in the neurotransmitters. For us readers he fully explains how we may determine our dominant neurotransmitter and deficiencies through a long series of questions. If our deficiencies are mild, he believes that if we take his diet, vitamin/supplements, and lifestyle advice for our specific needs and perhaps use a cranial electrical stimulator at home through prescription, we will be able to balance our brain’s chemistry. Moderate or severe problems will need a doctor’s help to use medication and natural hormones.

You’re probably wondering about those questions, aren’t you? The Braverman Nature Assessment found in the third chapter has two parts: Determining Your Dominant Nature (neurotransmitters give us different personalities) and Defining Your Deficiencies. The questions address our memory and attention, physical, personality and character. I did try to take the test, but I know I’m acetylcholine-dominant because those people are creative, open to new ideas and crave fats (good fats are best!).

This might sound weird, but still his patients for over ten years have gotten much better. Some other interesting things I learned is that our bad eating or lifestyle habits are caused by imbalances in our neurotransmitters. If you are dominant and deficient in dopamine, you will need your coffee just to get going and if it’s even worse you will crave nicotine or cocaine that will enhance your dopamine, make you addicted and need more of it unless you build up your dopamine through dopamine’s precursor/amino acid found in food. If you are like half of the world and GABA-dominant, you may need more glutamate found largely in whole wheat or whole grains among other things. Serotonin? You may turn to alcohol or simple carbohydrates if you’re deficient, but there are much better choices.

To make it easier for us, Braverman in the third and final section explains just how to balance our brains so that all neurotransmitters are helped or how to ’bend our personality’ by focusing on one. Braverman’s wife, Dasha Braverman, B.S., RPA-C, founder and director of Rainbow Wellness Center, offers an all-encompassing diet rich in the seven colors of fruits, vegetables and whole grains of which eighty percent of our diet should be composed and then twenty percent of protein from lean red meat, poultry and fish. So how much of fats? I guess those are part of our proteins, although olive oil is used in her sample menus.

Criticism

I went to Dasha’s website and noticed pictures of her taken at the Mrs. New York Pageant last year, one in a swimsuit, and she looks emaciated. I think she seriously needs more fats in her diet. And this is just a year after giving birth to twins!

The Edge Effect has many good things about it. I found fascinating the information about how our brains work, what the neurotransmitters do for us and how deficiencies or surpluses in our brains can cause all but genetic problems in our entire body. I like that Braverman uses bioidentical hormones instead of synthetic or natural (natural for horses!) and that he doesn’t try to sell us a product or even lead us to his center’s website. His advice could be extremely helpful for a person experiencing health problems that will not go away and are getting worse.

Vegetarians or vegans aren’t discussed in the 278-page, 12-chapter book that I recall, but on Dasha’s website (link from pathmed.com) she writes that she’s never seen a healthy vegetarian, only weak, tired ones! And you’d have to have a degree in nutrition to be healthy. Well, that’s out of the dark ages. I find this so demeaning and unhelpful as a very healthy vegan that I’m docking a star. Besides, her diet lacks enough fat, Braverman knocks coconut oil as if hydrogenated coconut oil is the same as organic and he only mentions his clients following his treatment, but no clinical studies or references besides doctors he’s worked with.

I do highly recommend it, especially if you fear Alzheimer’s, often a deficiency of acetylcholine, and cannot lose weight, quit a bad habit or feel energetic and content. I'm taking it seriously. With The Edge Effect you may discover how to perform at your best.



Recommended: Yes