Nutrients that Make Me Smarter?
Written by Rui Yun
Edited by Emily Moran
May 2, 2021
Edited by Emily Moran
May 2, 2021
Did you know that the brain takes 2 percent of your body weight, but it can consume 20 percent of your daily calories (Raichle & Gusnard, 2002)? Have you wondered what food or nutrients are good for brain health? Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign conducted research on the NBPs, the nutrient biomarkers pattern from the Mideterrean diet, and they found out monounsaturated fatty acid can affect a specific brain network connectivity which supports general intelligence.
It is pretty exciting that there are researchers who have already given an insight into the potential nutrients on cognition (Zamroziewicz & Barbey, 2016). Researchers from Illinois took a further step, they want to figure out the connection among nutrients, brain network, and general intelligence. They were able to find the association between monounsaturated fatty acid and its effect on a certain brain network, called the dorsal attention network (Zwilling et al., 2017). The research participants were older adults who had an average age of 69. Researchers asked them to do different tests like picture design, similarities test, etc., to get scores as a standard for general intelligence. Seventeen plasma lipids were collected from each participant to find out the amount of saturated fatty acids and monounsaturated fatty acid. Nutrient Biomarker Pattern (NBP) analysis is used to examine the effect of plasma nutrients on brain network connectivity. Through mediation analysis, researchers have found out that monosaturated fatty acid influenced the brain network, which supports general intelligence.
The results infer that there are certain nutrients in the food that are associated with the prevention of memory loss and other brain functions. Due to the limitations of the cross-sectional study, we are still waiting for researchers to conduct longitudinal studies to see how the change of fatty acids is related to the change of general intelligence.
References
Raichle, Marcus E. & Gusnard, Debra A. (2002). Appraising the brain’s energy budget. PNAS, 99(16), 10237-10239. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC124895/
Zwilling, C. E., Talukdar, T., Zamroziewicz, M. K., & Barbey, A. K. (2019). Nutrient biomarker patterns, cognitive function, and fMRI measures of network efficiency in the aging brain. NeuroImage, 188, 239-251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.12.007
Image Source: “Network brain” by Salvia Santos licensed under CC BY 3.0. / cropped from the original image