We all share worries about brain decline, especially among the aging population. Scientists have long concluded that mental processing does slow with age. According to most studies, the human brain stops growing in its early 20s, after which it starts to contract. But studies show as we age it is never too late to begin a brain workout and that it can make a difference.

Brain plasticity or neuroplasticity, a familiar term among neuroscientists, is a concept that the brain is not static and will respond to new learning. A Mayo Clinic study of 487 healthy adults aged 65 and older demonstrated that with cognitive fitness training, older adults more than doubled their auditory processing speed (a 131% gain.) This translated to improved memory and attention.

A leading brain fitness company, part of a quickly growing industry, has developed brain workout software. The concept is based on neuroplasticity, the re-wiring of neural pathways, and neurogenesis, the lifelong production of new brain cells.

In the past two years, a team of scientists developed the workout software that can promote positive chemical, physical and functional changes in the brain. Dr. Michael Merzenich of the University of California San Francisco and his colleagues around the world have been leading this effort.

Does muscle strength affect cognitive fitness? The quotidian thought on this has been it was one or the other, brains or brawn. However, a fascinating report was published in the November 2009 edition of the Archives of Neurology by neurologist Dr. Patricia Boyle and her colleagues in Chicago. Researchers initially tested the strength of 970 men and women with normal memory and an average age of 80. Over a four year period they found those who ranked in the top 10% of muscle strength were less likely to experience cognitive loss. Dr. Boyle noted also that, overall, stronger people had less mental decline. She stated that good physical health is important for good brain function and emphasized the importance of staying physically active and keeping muscles strong.

On yet another note Richard Davidson and his neuroscience team at the University of Wisconsin scanned the brains of Tibetan monks to assess the effect of meditation on brain fitness. They found the experienced meditators had achieved increased activation in important areas of the brain that controlled attention and emotion. The monks were able to stay mentally in control and not react to external, distracting stimuli. Not only that but if they meditated with a deliberate goal such as compassion, it would saturate the whole mind and increase the likelihood of spontaneous acts of kindness to others.

Brain fitness is like physical fitness. Some is better than none, more is better than some, according to researcher, Dr. Henry Mahncke. He says, "Sustaining physical fitness, good nutrition, a vibrant social life, plus brain fitness will enable successful aging.

Big Pharma has been trending this direction for a long time: marketing medicines to people who don't need them and who have nothing wrong with their health. It's all part of a ploy to position prescription drugs as nutrients -- things you need to take on a regular basis in order to prevent disease.

The FDA recently gave its nod of approval on the matter, announcing that Crestor can now be advertised and prescribed as a "preventive" medicine. No longer does a patient need to have anything wrong with them to warrant this expensive prescription medication: They only need to remember the brand name of the drug from television ads.

This FDA approval for the marketing of Crestor to healthy people is a breakthrough for wealthy drug companies. Selling drugs only to people who are sick is, by definition, a limited market. Expanding drug revenues requires reaching people who have nothing wrong with them and convincing them that taking a cocktail of daily pharmaceuticals will somehow keep them healthy.

All this is, of course, the greatest quackery we've yet seen from Big Pharma, because once this floodgate of "preventive pharmaceuticals" is unleashed, the drug companies will be positioned to promote a bewildering array of other preventive chemicals you're supposed to take at the same time. Did you take your anti-cancer pill today? How about your anti-diabetes pill? Anti-cholesterol pill? Don't forget your anti-Alzheimer's pill, too.

Medications are not vitamins
The very idea that these drugs can somehow prevent a person from becoming sick in the future strains the boundaries of scientific credibility. Only natural therapies like nutrition can prevent the onset of disease, not patented chemicals that don't belong in the human body in the first place.

The logical argument of the drug companies who push these "preventive" prescriptions is essentially that the human body is deficient in pharmaceuticals, and that deficiency can only be corrected by taking whatever brand-name drugs they show you on television. Forget about deficiencies in zinc, or vitamin D, or living enzymes; what your body really needs is more synthetic chemicals!

The FDA agrees with this loopy logic. And why wouldn't it? Subscribing to this pharmaceutical delusion is an easy way to instantly expand Big Pharma's customer base by tens of millions. Overnight, the market for Crestor ballooned from a few million people with high cholesterol to the entire U.S. population of 300 million people.

If Crestor can help healthy people be healthier (which it can't, but let's play along with this delusion for the sake of argument), then it's only a matter of time before they start adding Crestor to infant formula. I mean, why not? If it's so good for healthy people, then it must make babies healthier, too, right?

So let's add Crestor to sports drinks. Let's sprinkle it into the iodized salt supply. Let's drip it into the municipal water! (Don't laugh: This idea of dripping cholesterol drugs into the water supply has already been suggested by more than one doctor.) Let's merge the pharmaceutical supply with the food supply and charge people prescription drugs prices for "functional" foods laced with these chemicals!

Pharmaceutical deficiency
That's really where all this is headed. When medicines are approved as preventive "nutrients" for the human body, it's only a matter of time before the industry starts talking about your "pharmaceutical deficiency."

Not taking any medications? You have a pharmaceutical deficiency, and it needs to be corrected by taking more prescription drugs. But don't bother with actual nutrition, because nutrients have absolutely no role in preventing disease, the FDA claims. No nutrient has ever been approved by the FDA for the prevention or treatment of any disease whatsoever.

The message from the FDA is quite clear on this: Nutrients are useless, and you should eat medications as if they were vitamins.

Patented Big Pharma chemicals, after all, provide all the nutrition you'll ever need!