Give Your Brain A Much Needed Boost
Here is a reason that your doctors tell you to eat certain foods. One of the most common types of food that they recommend is fish. Fish has a good source of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fat that can help your heart.
It seems that nutrition experts have made a breakthrough and they believe that DHA will help to give your brain a nice boost. DHA makes up much of the cell membranes in our brains. Food producers are taking the concept and running with it - they’re adding DHA to foods like yogurt, soy milk and eggs, then marketing them with slogans that we just can’t resist. The question on everyone’s mind is whether or not these new foods will really help?
Some research links higher intakes of DHA with reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease and the cognitive decline that precedes it. In a 2003 study in the Archives of Neurology, people aged 65-plus who ate at least one (DHA-rich) fish meal per week had a 60 percent reduced risk for Alzheimer’s. And growing evidence suggests DHA supplementation during pregnancy and early infancy may result in superior cognitive performance of the child.
This past June, a randomized clinical trial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition revealed that nine-month-old babies of mothers who’d eaten DHA-fortified cereal bars (about 200 mg of DHA daily) during the last trimester of their pregnancies demonstrated better problem-solving skills than those whose mothers consumed “placebo” cereal bars.
Currently, there is no research to show that eating DHA-rich foods improves mental function in healthy adults. “It remains to be seen whether initiating DHA later in life has an important effect on the brain,” says Joseph Quinn, M.D., associate professor of neurology at Oregon Health & Science University. Of course you never truly know unless you try. If it doesn’t well at least you are eating healthy and keeping the other important parts of your body healthy.