You are, as the expression goes, what you eat. After all, the very tissues of your body, the fuels that power every cell, the hormones that keep you humming, all must ultimately be furnished by the foods you eat. No surprise, then, that over the past two decades, perhaps spurred most intensely by health concerns and the performance demands of elite athletes, a burgeoning body of literature has documented the intimate connections between food and health. At the same time, an interest in nutrition has moved from the fringes of cultural life squarely into the mainstream.
But that turns out to be a very neck-down view of things. For while the foods we eat have measurable effects on the body's performance, they may prove to have an even more critical influence on how the brain handles its tasks. The brain is an extremely metabolically active organ, making it a very hungry one, and a picky eater at that. The idea that the right foods, or the natural neurochemicals they contain, can enhance mental capabilities—help you concentrate, tune sensorimotor skills, keep you motivated, magnify memory, speed reaction times, defuse stress, perhaps even prevent brain aging—is not idle speculation.
Nutritional neuroscience, as it's called, is barely in its infancy. But it's already turning up some very heady findings. Among them:
- A diet that draws heavily on fatty foods and only lightly on fruits and vegetables isn't just bad for your heart and linked to certain cancers—it may also be a major cause of depression and aggression in North America. Such a diet is particularly common among men.
- The health of your brain depends not only on how much fat you eat but on what kind it is. Intellectual performance requires the specific type of fat found most commonly in fish. Even diets that adhere to commonly recommended levels of fats, but of the wrong kind, can undermine intelligence. What makes this finding awkward is that certain oils widely touted as healthy for the heart are especially troublesome for the mind. The findings also raise serious concerns about formulas fed to the vast majority of American infants.
- It's possible to boost alertness, memory, and stress resistance by supplying food components that are precursors of important brain neurotransmitters, but so far they have only been tested on people with nutritional deficiencies. However, given the number of women who regularly diet, that group may include more people than researchers imagined.
- Sugar can make you sharp—if you can figure out the right dose at the right time. A kind of Gatorade for the mind may be available in the U.S. within a few years.
- Carbohydrates—especially when eaten with no protein or fat—may indeed be mentally soothing.
- Mood and mental performance are powerfully influenced by the B vitamins. Unfortunately, marginal deficiency in many B vitamins is widespread in North America.
While it's easy to dismiss the intensifying interest in nutrition as a selfish search for the formula or supplement that will turn us into Einsteins and confer that competitive edge, there's evidence that we're also seeking more. An abiding interest in the nutrient qualities of the foods we consume—even if honored more in the breach than the observance—also reflects our deep yearning for reconnection to the natural world and heightened awareness of how it sustains us. Call it deep nutrition.
Don't Be a (Saturated) Fathead
It was enough to inspire kind thoughts of filet mignon, foie gras, and creme brulee. Periodically over the past decade, researchers, including those engaged in a massive study known in the health biz as MR. FIT (Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial), announced that low cholesterol levels—the aim of heart-healthy eating—are linked in men to an increased risk of suicide, homicide, accidents, and other violent deaths. Even some doctors began to wonder if they should stop prescribing cholesterol-lowering medications.
But Charles Glueck, M.D., medical director of the Cholesterol Center of Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, has never taken the findings at face value. He sees no direct cause-effect relationship between low cholesterol and violent death. He beefs that MR. FIT failed to examine critical variables that may predispose those who are violent to low cholesterol levels—namely, depression, often exacerbated by drug and/or alcohol abuse, all of which often leads to malnutrition. The generally poor nutritional status of certain depressed people deprives them of food components required for normal mood states, Glueck explains.
In fact, Glueck finds that high cholesterol levels are not only bad for the heart, they're dreadful for the brain. High blood levels of cholesterol, and especially of a related saturated blood fat known as triglyceride, are strongly correlated, in both adults and children, with the incidence of affective disorders, including depression, manic depression, and schizoaffective disorder, as well as with hostility and aggression. Most fats in food are composed of triglycerides, which are broken down to various fatty acids. "We have shown that in patients with high triglycerides who were in a depressive state, the more you lower the triglycerides, the more you alleviate the depression."
In a dramatic 1994 study, Glueck and colleagues demonstrated that hypertriglyceridemia, together with high total cholesterol and low HDL or "good" cholesterol, were the sole causative factors in mild to serious depression he detected in patients referred for treatment of severe familial hypertriglyceridemia.
None of the patients—fourteen men and nine women—were receiving psychiatric care. But when he administered a standard test for depressive symptoms, Glueck found that a substantial 39 percent of them had mild to severe depression.
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