Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP wrote The Starved Brain. He is an interventional pain physician in St. Louis, which is an unusual place for a book about cognitive decline to come from, so the connection is worth setting out plainly.
Why a pain physician wrote a book about the brain
His clinical work runs on one principle: treat the terrain, not the symptom. Most chronic disease he sees is downstream of metabolic, structural and inflammatory failures that are measurable and modifiable, and the symptom that brings someone through the door is rarely the thing that needs correcting.
Pain was simply where he noticed it first. The same fuel failure, the same inflammation and the same nutrient shortfalls that keep a back from healing are the ones the brain is built out of. The book is that observation followed into a different organ.
What he sees in his own patients
The book argues that a population which has never missed a meal is nonetheless running short of the specific materials the brain is made from. That argument started as a pattern in the clinic rather than in the literature.
In the general adult population, fewer than 12.2% were metabolically healthy by NHANES 2009–2016 criteria (Araujo, Cai and Stevens, 2018). Under tighter cardiometabolic criteria through 2017–2018, that figure had fallen to under 7% (O’Hearn and colleagues, 2022). A halving inside a decade is the part worth sitting with.
Inside the practice the numbers are narrower still: fewer than 3% of patients overall are metabolically healthy, and fewer than 1% of chronic pain patients are. Those are practice-reported figures from our own population, not trial outcomes, and individual results vary. They are also the reason the book treats metabolic dysfunction as the default condition to be excluded rather than an unusual finding to be hunted for.
The credentials that bear on the argument
The book crosses metabolic medicine, pain medicine and cognition. The training crosses the same ground. Dr. Padda holds five American board certifications:
- Obesity Medicine — American Board of Obesity Medicine
- Addiction Medicine — American Board of Addiction Medicine
- Interventional Pain — American Board of Interventional Pain Physicians (ABIPP)
- Pain Medicine — American Board of Pain Medicine
- Anesthesiology — American Board of Anesthesiology
Three of those matter directly to what the book claims. Obesity medicine and his Diplomate status with the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners cover the metabolic half of the argument. Certification as a rater for the Montreal Cognitive Assessment covers the other half: it is the screening instrument used to measure the decline the book is about. He is also a Fellow of Interventional Pain Physicians (FIPP), a Certified Physician Executive, an advisor to the Nutrition Network, and practices at a Low Carb USA certified clinic.
How the evidence is handled
The book runs to ten chapters and twenty-six peer-reviewed references, and it flags its own weak spots. Where a widely cited study did not reach statistical significance, it says so. Where the authors of a paper explain their findings differently than he does, their explanation is included.
That habit is not editorial modesty. Dr. Padda served as Deputy Director of the Saint Louis University Institutional Review Board and has reviewed for journals in his field, which is several years of reading trials with the specific job of finding what a paper is not saying. A book that only supplies the agreeable studies is not one to trust with your brain.
Training and appointments
Dr. Padda took his MD at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, trained in general surgery at Cook County Hospital, and completed anesthesiology residencies at Illinois Masonic Medical Center and at Washington University / Barnes Hospital, where he was Chief Resident in 1991–92. He holds an MBA from Saint Louis University.
He was Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and of Pediatrics at Saint Louis University and Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital through the 1990s, and since 2024 has been faculty in the Kansas City University and Freeman Health System psychiatry residency. He is President of the Missouri Society of Interventional Pain Physicians, and his work is published in Neuromodulation, Pain Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Anesthesia & Analgesia and Pain Physician. The full record is on his Padda Institute physician page.
Credential verification
None of this has to be taken on trust. Dr. Padda is licensed in Missouri and Illinois, and the record is public.
- National Provider Identifier: 1427035955
- Missouri medical license: MD 100572
- Healthgrades profile
- Doximity profile
His clinical practice
Dr. Padda directs the Padda Institute in St. Louis, an interventional pain and regenerative medicine practice, and holds full staff privileges at Anderson Hospital in Maryville, Illinois. He is Chief Medical Officer of Valor Villages, the St. Louis 501(c)(3) nonprofit that houses veterans and children in crisis.
The book
The Starved Brain is available in full at no cost, and the argument also exists as a five-part video series running about ninety minutes.
Board certifications and professional affiliations
Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP holds five board certifications and maintains the professional affiliations below.
