YOUR BRAIN ON

By Brenda Patoine

THE CONSTANT STREAM of “news” and promos touting the next best diet to follow or food to consume to achieve better brain health can make it hard to sort out science-based hope from over-marketed hype. What if all this focus is missing the real culprit of cognitive health: the high-fat, sugar-heavy, overprocessed Western diet?

The question takes on new urgency in the context of a global pandemic in which many people are existing in a state of persistent, heightened pandemic stress. Stress interacts with diet in myriad ways to influence brain function. For starters, it may increase the metabolic demands of the brain, which already commands about 20 percent of the body’s energy in normal adulthood (and up to two-thirds in early childhood). The kind of “uncertainty stress” induced by pandemic unknowns may be particularly taxing, keeping the brain in a constant state of high alert. Growing evidence suggests the right diet may mitigate some of the ill effects of stress, while the wrong one may worsen the effects, especially during sensitive periods of brain development and aging when dietary factors take on heightened import.

Pandemic or not, one thing is abundantly clear: What we eat matters to our brains. Just like physical health, mental and emotional health is intimately tied to the quality of our diet. What that means to you and me, in terms of how, or if, we ought to change our diet to optimize and sustain brain health, is the focus of research around the globe.

No Quick Fixes

“People are after a quick fix,” says Sarah Spencer , who studies how high-fat diets affect the brain as head of neuroendocrinology at RMIT University in Australia. “They want to know, ‘Can I take this pill or eat this bean to fix my brain?’ But it’s a lot more complicated than that. There are no quick fixes.”

Neuroscientist Claire Williams , the head of University of Reading's UK research team that recently published on the acute cognitive benefits of blueberries, concurs: “I don’t think there’s a ‘magic bullet’ that we can take every day of our lives that’s going to ward off declines in cognition from aging.”

Given those caveats, what can we say with confidence about how diet affects brain health, beneficially or detrimentally?

The Anti-Brain Diet

First, the bad news. The typical Western diet is not brainfriendly. Saturated fat and sugar are the big culprits, and they go hand-in-hand with processed foods. The high-fat, highsugar “obesogenic” diet has become a staple of brain studies looking at the detrimental effects of food on cognition and mood in experimental models. These studies find reliable and consistent cognitive impairment after even short periods (for rodents) on such diets.