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Wanted: dietary research for apps to beat dementia and make us smarter（1209 words）
By Sarah Murray
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Many apps exist to monitor fitness and food intake — but might they one day be used to help us choose foods that can help to combat mental decline in old age or improve children’s academic performance?
The amount of study in these areas has increased in recent years, says Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, professor in the departments of neurosurgery and integrative biology and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles. “We can now pinpoint very specific effects.”
When it comes to children, for example, strong links emerge between nutrition and academic performance.
“There’s a pretty high correlation with having breakfast and being able to perform cognitively during the school day,” says David Just, co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs at Cornell University.
He says studies have found that students participating in the United States Department of Agriculture’s school breakfast programme achieved better grades and standardised test scores than those who did not.
Having enough to eat also affects children’s behaviour, says Prof Just: “Being hungry is highly associated with disciplinary problems, suspension and altercations with other students.”
In addition, certain behavioural problems in children, including fighting and decreased concentration spans, are associated with specific foods, such as caffeinated products or sugary drinks.
“A lot of the snacking policies, particularly for pre-school and younger grades, are being designed to curb behavioural problems,” says Prof Just. This usually means removing snacks high in sugar, saturated fats and sodium from vending machines.
Work is also being carried out to find links between different types of foods and brain performance at an older age. Researchers at the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, for example, are studying links between nutritional intake and cognition and brain health in older adults.
“Ageing isn’t uniform and you have different rates of decline of cognitive function, but we think you can use particular nutrients to mitigate some of those [ageing] effects,” says Marta Zamroziewicz, a researcher at the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory.
Ms Zamroziewicz says her team’s work includes research on how combinations of nutrients — as opposed to individual ones — affect the brain, and sees a potential role for more advanced uses of technology.
One of the laboratory’s findings is that certain nutrients — including omega 3, polyunsaturated fats and phosphatidylcholine, a combination of nutrients found in foods such as egg yolk and some red meats — are linked to a slower decline in “cognitive flexibility”, the ability to switch between tasks.
“Groups of nutrients might have more impact on the brain,” she says. “So if you could have an application that tells you which foods have certain patterns of nutrients, that would be great.”
UCLA’s Prof Gomez-Pinilla adds that research is also providing insights into what not to eat. “We found that fructose [the form of sugar commonly used in processed foods] enhances many pathways that are related to diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” he says. “So the idea is that consuming too much of this in the long term can increase the risk of many of these disorders.”
Prof Just believes that a logical step would be to design apps that, like those that already exist to help people make healthier dietary choices, would direct them towards foods that improve brain function. However, apps need underlying data to support them and more research needs to be done to identify the effects of specific foods on the brain before they can be developed.
Prof Just says: “We need to understand better what’s needed in a diet for academic performance.”
And Ms Zamroziewicz says: “It’s very, very, early stages of this work and the idea that particular nutrients might influence specific features of brain ageing is relatively new.”
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