I am Tanya Zilberter and I am writing about brain on Internet for the last three years, since I joined the project concerning the great importance of energy homeostasis for the brain health. The plain-language description of the project and a broader view of brain metabolism can be found at the Brain Fuels.
I hold a PhD in physiology and my diploma project was about neurons in brain centers controlling hunger and satiety. Later, I worked in several interdisciplinary teams on different aspects of different homeostases including thermoregulation, energy intake, distribution, utilization, and deposition – until in 2002, I developed a common-people, user-friendly ketogenic diet and in two years watched it wonderfully grow. What happened next was rather typical for successful Internet projects – my Banta Diet was posted all over the forums and I decided to make it an open access online program. Then Americans became so obese that they generally lost interest in any diet. I analyzed the trend and figured out that the dieting-related searches in my traffic sources moved to Asia and Africa and people formerly crazy about losing weight are now interested in aging and Alzheimer’s disease (not that these two are unrelated).
Indeed, Alzheimer’s disease is an awful problem as baby boomers get older especially if consider a complete lack of effective treatment. The good news is, the researchers are doing a good job studying mechanisms of this and several other diseases under the common name “neurodegenerative diseases”. Another good news is, there’s some success in sorting out what elements of life style increase the risks and what elements do the opposite – help to prevent, postpone, and alleviate the disease manifestations.
This is why I hope to do something to help people to:
- pay attention
- understand
- act accordingly
I also hope that we can start a dialog, share experiences, and make a difference!
Tanya Zilberter 
