The Brain-Diet Connection

When athletes want to enhance their competitive edge, the action plan is simple. They step up the intensity of their training and complement that effort with a diet—whether high in protein, easily digested carbohydrates, B vitamins or whatever—known to feed the muscles and systems that support physical performance.

But what if these athletes aren’t competing on the physical field, but in the arena of the mind, facing competitors from basic assaults on attention and memory to disordered states like Alzheimer’s and AD/HD? Is there a mental equivalent to the energy bar or power beverage? Can we actually eat our way to a better brain, and keep ourselves that way longer?

The referees haven’t made their final call. But what we eat does affect cognitive function; certain nutrients, compounds and whole foods demonstrate often amazing actions on the brain. “Broadly speaking, the same processes that will affect your body will affect your brain,” says Chetan Rao, sales and marketing manager for functional and nutraceutical businesses, Specialty Products Division, Hormel Foods Corporation, Austin, MN. “The brain is an organ and, like any other organ, it goes through the same degradative processes.”

Yet the relationship between diet and cognition is both so intuitively simple and so scientifically complex that we practically need a six-course feast of “brain foods” just to wrap our minds around it. So, before manufacturers start promising better thinking through groceries, they’d best rein in expectations and gain more understanding of just what it means to feed the mind.

Hungry minds

Since the days of Descartes, questions pitting mind against body, and unity vs. duality, have kept philosophers in brisk business. Meanwhile, the rest of us just wonder if there’s anything in the pantry that’ll make us smarter. We’re not getting any younger, and as the years slip by, everything from our powers of concentration to wherever it was that we left our car keys slip along with them. Baby boomers, in particular, feel the slide, and approximately 10 million of them will develop Alzheimer’s disease, according to data from the Alzheimer’s Association, Chicago.

On the other end of the lifecycle, babies, children and adolescents are also the target for diets that can optimize mental development and performance. The lesson for them is the sooner these kids start eating right, the better they’ll fare.

It’s no wonder the market for food and drink designed with mental function in mind has grown more than 180% since 2005, with upward of 400 products launched in 2007 alone, according to Chicago-based Mintel’s Global New Product Database. “This whole area is emerging so fast right now,” says Ram Chaudhari, Ph.D., senior vice president, R&D, Fortitech, Inc., Schenectady, NY. “As the population gets older, everybody’s trying to link nutrition to brain health or cognitive function.” Yet, he says, because this is an area that “we have largely overlooked in a clinical sense,” we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

Believe the hype?

Everything from emotion and depression to memory, Alzheimer’s, learning disabilities, AD/HD and basic neuroprotection has a dietary component. Equally wide-ranging are the mechanisms by which diet acts: oxidation protection, structural support, the provision of key metabolites and more. Thus, when considering the diet-cognition link, it’s best to take things step by step.

According to Carol Greenwood, Ph.D., professor, Department of Nutritional Science, University of Toronto, “There are a couple of points that, as we stand back, we need to get across.” First is the importance of glucose. “The prevailing thought, although it’s not well examined at this point, is that low-glycemic-index carbohydrate foods that may be able to sustain blood glucose levels over longer periods of time theoretically should have a benefit, just because of their sustainability,” she says. But, “there’s no question that while we can talk about this theoretically, there’s still need for more research in that area.”

The other key caveat, Greenwood says, is there are “actually a number of different processes that are going on” in the diet-cognition dance. “So you may be looking at targeting something that’s good for memory,” she says. “That becomes important, because if we talk about memory, then we’re talking about very specific regions of the brain. Once we recognize this, then we can start to look at what we know about those regions and how they’re affected by diet.”

In other words, deep investigation is key. While Chaudhari sees a “potential protective effect of all the nutrients we’re seeing in the marketplace, like pomegranate, green tea, berries and everything else, clinically, it’s very difficult to make those connections, because you’ve got to have good, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies, which are not easy to do.”