Your brain weighs about three pounds and is comprised of a dense mass of over 100 billion nerve cells surrounded and separated by large amounts of fat. While your brain makes up about 2 percent of your body weight, it consumes a greedy 20 percent of your total energy. "Brain foods" provide nutrition that meets your brain's specific requirements for optimal health.
Influential Nutrition
An article in a 2003 issue of "Psychology Today" defines brain food as food that has a particularly strong influence on the way the brain functions. Brain foods support the brain's considerable demand for energy and improve its efficiency. The benefits of consuming brain-healthy foods include improved mood, increased motivation levels and sharper mental performance. Brain foods may also be able to improve memory and forestall aging processes.
Anti-Inflammatory Properties
Fish qualifies as a brain food by virtue of its high levels of anti-inflammatory omega-3 fatty acids. Nutritional recommendations emphasize the proportions of certain fats in the diet as more important to brain health than total fat intake. If the majority of fat in your diet comes from unhealthy saturated animal fats or trans fats -- fats that have been processed into a form that makes them useful for commercial food preparation but unhealthy for consumption -- you may be doing your brain more harm than good. All cell membranes, including those in the brain, are composed largely of fats. The healthy essential fatty acids in fish oil are well suited for utilization by the brain. These fats provide fluidity to the cell membranes and efficient transmission of nerve impulses, for optimal brain function.
Performance Enhancement
Choline, a B vitamin, improves mental performance both as as a necessary factor in the production of cell membranes and as a building block in the manufacture of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is important for memory function. Reaction times improve with choline, and it may also minimize fatigue. Milk, eggs, liver and peanuts are good sources of choline, and choline can also be taken as a supplement. The recommended daily intake for choline is 425 mg for women and 550 mg for men.
Memory Boosting
Add green tea to your brain foods shopping list and it may be the last time you have to write it down. Compounds in green tea improve memory and attention, according to a study published in a 2011 issue of the "Journal of Medicinal Foods." In the study, participants with cognitive decline took 1,680 mg of L-theanine -- an amino acid extract of green tea -- per day for 16 weeks. The researchers found that brain theta waves, which indicate alertness, increased significantly, as did results of memory tests in the study. They concluded that L-theanine shows potential as a natural supplement for improving cognitive function, including memory.
References
- Psychology Today; What Is Good Brain Food?; Hara Estroff Marano; October 1, 2003
- Harvard Health Publications: Listing of Vitamins
- "Journal of Medicinal Food"; A Combination of Green Tea Extract and l-Theanine Improves Memory and Attention in Subjects with Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Study; Park SK, et al.; February 2011
- National Geographic: Brain
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