Research is serving up the evidence for brain food

[Guest guest]

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/7283965.htm

 

Research is serving up the evidence for brain food

BY TOM SIEGFRIED

The Dallas Morning News

 

 

NEW ORLEANS - (KRT) - Eating a spinach salad for lunch every day might be

smarter than you think - it could make you think smarter.

 

If you don't like spinach, try a cup of blueberries instead. Unless you plan on

flying to Mars - or otherwise exposing yourself to cosmic rays. In that case

forget the blueberries - snarf down a daily pint of strawberries.

 

OK, this all sounds a little suspiciously like the dietary advice you get from

those paid TV or radio shows pushing " miracle " medicines that supposedly

maintain your mind in a perpetually youthful condition. But actually it's what

real brain scientists are finding out about food for thought. If you want to

keep your brain healthy and wise as you age, you don't need to be making the

health-food-fad industry wealthy.

 

To be sure, it's a little too soon to clip a recipe for retaining your faculties

from the meeting program of the Society for Neuroscience. But at the society's

annual meeting, held last week in New Orleans, several researchers reported

intriguing new clues, mostly from animal studies, to the secret of keeping the

mind youthful as the body ages.

 

In rats, for instance, a blueberry-rich diet seemed to reduce levels of a brain

chemical linked to memory loss with age. Older rats generally possess higher

levels of the chemical, known as NF-Kappa-B, and higher levels of it correspond

with poorer memory. But older rats that had been fed blueberry supplements had

NF-Kappa-B levels similar to young rats in several brain regions involved in

memory.

 

" Of course, you cannot automatically apply these findings from rats to the human

being, " said David Malin, a neuroscientist at the University of Houston-Clear

Lake, who participated in the study. " But nevertheless, these results … are also

consistent with a wider pattern of results emerging from a number of

laboratories. And this pattern of results raises at least the possibility that

fairly simple diet modifications might slow down the normal process of brain

aging and memory impairment. "

 

Malin said that it isn't clear how blueberries confer their benefits, but

presumably some of the chemicals that produce the blue color also protect cells

against the renegade molecular fragments called free radicals. Free radicals

damage cells by the chemical process called oxidation; the protective chemicals

found in blueberries and many other fruits and vegetables are therefore known as

antioxidants. Common dietary antioxidants include vitamins C, E and forms of

vitamin A.

 

Naturally you don't need to eat a cup of blueberries to get a good dose of

antioxidants - you get about as much from a large spinach salad, said James

Joseph of Tufts University in Boston. But nobody knows which particular

antioxidant gives the brain the most benefit. In fact, it seems most likely that

the best recipe contains combinations of various antioxidants.

 

" I think it's becoming clear that there's going to be no universal antioxidant, "

said Bernard Rabin, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore

County.

 

Furthermore, different combinations may be best for protecting against different

dangers. Blueberries, for instance, don't seem to help rats exposed to heavy

atomic nuclei present in cosmic rays.

 

The cosmic ray question is a serious one, since future space travelers would no

doubt be exposed to damaging doses without some sort of protection.

 

" There's no way to send enough shielding up there to protect the astronauts and

still fly the mission, " Rabin said during a news conference at the neuroscience

society meeting. " We thought we would try some of the diets we've heard had been

successful in counteracting the effects of aging. "

 

Rats exposed to cosmic ray particles do not perform very well on tasks designed

to get them to push a bar many times for a food reward. Even rats fed

blueberry-enriched diets before and after exposure to the rays still eventually

show less skill on the task.

 

But cosmic-rayed rats given a strawberry supplement perform similarly to the

rats never exposed to cosmic ray particles at all.

 

" We believe diet can be an important component of radiation protection for

astronauts on exploratory class missions to Mars and perhaps even to other

planets, " Rabin reported at the meeting.

 

Of course, many questions remain to be answered before you'll know for sure

which is the best berry for your brain.

 

" It's still too early in the study of dietary supplements in fruits and

vegetables to really zero in on exactly what's happening, " said Carl Cotman, of

the University of California, Irvine. Much more information is needed on what

the proper doses are to produce beneficial effects, and especially on what

mixture of chemicals is helpful in which circumstances.

 

" We scientists love to study known amounts of single characterized compounds -

it's easy for us to study in a rigorous way, " said Malin. " But Mother Nature may

not think that way. "

 

Nature, in other words, may produce complicated foods for a reason - possibly to

help make brains smart enough to figure out what their owners ought to eat.

 

---

 

© 2003, The Dallas Morning News.

 

 

 

NEW WEB MESSAGE BOARDS - JOIN HERE.

Alternative Medicine Message Boards.Info

http://alternative-medicine-message-boards.info

 

 

 

Protect your identity with Mail AddressGuard