I am 49. I will be 50 in June. I have a form of cystic fibrosis. The average life expectancy for CF is currently around 36 or 37. I was diagnosed just before I turned 36 and I spent a year at death's door and had a real scary incident where I realized, at age 35.5, that if the drugs -- that were NOT working -- did not start working real soon, I could be dead within 24 hours.

That was over 14 years ago and I have spent a whole lot of years reading up on health topics and working to improve my health. I suspect I know a good bit more about the topic of what foods can do to a body and how to use them to get specific effects than you currently know or will ever know.

When I was a lot sicker, I did my best to avoid yeast-leavened bread and to limit yeast-leavened foods. I went so far as to come up with a pizza dough recipe that had no yeast in it. As I got healthier, I began tolerating bread better. I have a long history of tolerating wheat poorly and I still have to limit wheat. People with CF are at greater than average risk for Celiac (gluten and wheat intolerance) than the general population and it is common for people with CF to tolerate wheat and dairy poorly. I generally tolerate food better than I used to. I used to really struggle to eat and had a whole lot of food intolerances.

I have spent a whole lot of time in alternative med circles talking with people who have tried chelation and gotten super picky about the foods they eat and so on. Some of those folks have PhDs and some of them have been really helpful in explaining some things to me related to my own research into alternative therapies for my own condition.

One of the problems with your hypothesis here is that "bread" is not a monolith. There are a great many things that qualify as bread and they can contain quite a lot of different ingredients. I assume you mean yeast-leavened wheat breads. Yeast can be a problem for a number of reasons for people with certain issues and some folks don't tolerate wheat well. But you also find yeast and wheat in other things, so just eliminating "bread" doesn't fully solve that problem if one of those specific ingredients is the culprit.

Furthermore, my experience has been that, for example, how a crop is raised and processed can have such significant impact on the chemical make-up of a particular food such that I need to be a lot more specific even than “x food” in order to come up with meaningful restrictions. For example, I have to be careful with meats and there is a big difference between, say, kosher meat and non-kosher meat or organic, grass-fed meat and "commercially" grown (for lack of a better alternative term).

There are a huge number of things that impact brain health. I am getting my brain function back after having it significantly impaired by years of being very ill and years of taking a metric fuck ton of prescription drugs in order to avoid dying. Some things that have gone into repairing my brain function include B vitamins, the right fats, good quality salts and the right carbs.

If removing yeast-leavened wheat bread from your diet is doing you significant good with regards to your brain function, I will suggest that a likely explanation is a) you have an infection and the yeast feeds on the infection and creates alcohol within your system that impairs your brain function and/or b) you have what gets called "leaky gut syndrome" in some alternative med circles. The belief there is that leaky gut allows molecules to be directly absorbed into the blood stream and that causes proteins to cross the brain blood barrier and cause mental impairment. I don't know how accurate that mental model is. I don't specifically ascribe to it as far as my own health issues go.

However, I do know that the gut is about 70% of your immune system, so if there is anything wrong with your gut, you can bet money there is a shit-load of other problems happening because of it.

Removing stressors from your diet may take some of the load off a frail gut, but it won't repair it. Some things that may help include organic yogurt, good quality sea salt, the right carbs and the right fats (coconut oil and organic butter are two that work well for me).

I will reiterate that I really wish people like you would not jump in here with completely nonsensical assertions that they can't explain better than "I removed bread from my diet and I THINK it is helping, though I can't provide you any real metrics for how it is improving." I can provide real metrics for how much my health has improved and it has been nightmarish to try to get people to engage me in a meaningful manner and not dismiss me as just some quack. So folks like you just really get on my nerves.

Best of luck with your quest to slow your brain deterioration.