the brain food challenge, page-3

"BRAIN FOOD


Colourful berries could benefit your brain as well as your body. Barbara Shukitt-Hale and colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that supplementing rat diets with berries increased performance in older rats' brains. Early indications were that this may also apply to our own ageing brains.

Early in her research, Shukitt-Hale looked at rats equivalent in age to 65-85-year-old humans and supplemented their diets with high-antioxidant fruits and vegetables - strawberry, spinach or blueberry extracts. "We looked at changes in behaviour primarily, but we also found improvements in calcium metabolism and dopamine release," says Shukitt-Hale.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that becomes depleted in old age, especially in diseases such as Parkinson's, and calcium is important in nerve function. The teams have also found that berry supplements stimulate the growth of new nerve cells in rat brains, which is a process called neurogenesis.

"It seems that the extracts are doing more than just providing antioxidants. We've looked at the hippocampus (particularly important for memory) and not only do we find increased neurogenesis, but we are getting an increase in positive signalling too. That means there's more of certain growth factors that help nerve cells talk to each other," she says.

The 2% supplementation of berries in the rats equates to about a cup a day for a human. Shukitt-Hale is now collaborating with Robert Krikorian of the University of Cincinnati to see whether the extracts work in elderly humans. While their studies in the British Journal of Nutrition and the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry are small-scale, the preliminary results suggest that drinking about 500 mL a day of a juice prepared from whole blueberries or whole purple grapes for three months improves ability on verbal learning tests. - Clare Pain

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/print/5286/where-wild-berries-grow?page=0%2C2

Every morning I mix 2 desertspoons of freeze dried acai berry, 2 scoops of chia seeds, half a cup of blueberries, 2drops of vitamin D drops and 4 tablespoons of low fat natural greek yoghurt.
I'm confident that my brain loves it. But my bowel shows its appreciation...regularly.