Brain Food For Brain Power Throughout The Lifespan

Everything scientists know about brain food isn't about Alzheimer's and other diseases of the aging brain. There is quite a bit you can do at all stages of life to maintain your brain with diet. Let's start with the not yet born.

A fatty acid called docosahexaenoic acid, also known as DHA, is an essential building block of the neurons of the brain and of the retina both before birth and in the first year of life after birth. Babies whose mothers get more DHA during pregnancy, or who get more DHA from formula, grow into children with better verbal skills, better eye-hand coordination, and lower likelihood of ADHD by the age of eight. 

DHA is an omega-3 fatty acid that occurs in both healthy seed oils and in fish and krill oils. It's abundant in microalgae, although microalgae is a relatively expensive source of it, and it's also found in fish oil and fish. In the case of brain development in infants in children, supplements are actually superior to fish or spirulina as a source of adequate amounts of DHA. Fish oil and krill oil are better sources of another fatty acid called EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid), which fights inflammation, but doesn't build brains.

About 20 percent of the population of North America lacks a gene that codes the proteins for an enzyme called tetrahydromethylfolate reductase. This enzyme transforms the B vitamin folic acid into methylfolate which can be used by cells. Without this enzyme, just consuming enough folic acid doesn't do the body a lot of good. Over 90 percent of the folic acid consumed in the diet fails to enter cells. In fact, taking folic acid supplements actually interferes with the ability of cells to use it. This functional deficiency of methylfolate shows up as a tendency toward miscarriage in women, and various brain health issues in both sexes.

The solution for this problem is extraordinarily simple. Just take over the counter methylfolate. Costing less than $10 a month, this single intervention can make a huge difference in how your feel and how sharp you are.

There's some evidence that a high-fat diet acts on the hippocampus in ways that cause:

• Difficulties with forming memories, especially spatial memories (learning a dance step, playing competitive sports, juggling, finding your way through a new neighborhood).
• More of a crash after eating high-sugar foods, because of greater sensitivity to insulin.

Especially in men, even more than in women, reducing the amount of fat in the diet helps brain power, especially the ability to learn new physical skills and to maintain energy all day long no matter what your eat for breakfast or lunch. A healthy, balanced, lower-fat, lower-carb, lower-calorie meal, of course, is optimal for brain health.

READ Eating Fish At Least Two To Three Times A Week Will Decrease Your Risk Of Stroke

Fish, as mentioned earlier, seems to help maintain brain power in old age.

It's a reasonable question to ask whether it's really a good idea to eat fish when so many fish are contaminated with mercury. The brain researchers mentioned earlier in this article actually did find that eating more fish was associated with more mercury in the brain. However, higher mercury levels, at least in this study, were not associated with pathological changes in the brain. As long as you are not eating large amounts of predator fish, such as shark, the benefits of fish outweigh any problems with mercury.