Care & Feeding of Your Brain

It is not just your body that you need to fuel for performance. In fact, your brain not only responds to exercise but also to a healthy diet. The proper care and feeding of your brain will bring lifelong benefits.

Once is good more is better.

New research from the University of Maryland has shown that one exercise session increases activation in areas of the brain associated with memory. Your hippocampus, which can shrink with age and is the first region of your brain to be affected by Alzheimer’s, showed increased activation after one 30 minute cycling session at moderate intensity.

This study, which shows the benefit of one exercise session, adds to the growing research proving that regular exercise improves your brain’s volume, connectivity and efficiency.

Eat your greens

When it comes to keeping your brain well fed, eat your greens. Older adults that consistently ate a diet high in leafy greens retained their crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is the ability to use the skills and knowledge that you have acquired over a lifetime.

A study published in Frontiers of Aging Neuroscience shows that lutein found in leafy greens has a protective effect on neurons. They found that these cells had preserved cognitive functioning. The people eating the highest levels of leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables have thicker gray matter in the parahippocampal cortex. The area of the brain responsible for crystallized intelligence.

Another study on food and your brain published in NeuroImage measured nutritional biomarkers in healthy adults between 65-75 years old. They showed that eating a diet high in fruits, nuts, seeds, vegetables and whole grains, improved functional network efficiency and cognitive performance.

Study author Aron Barbey explains,

“Efficiency has to do with how information is communicated within the network. We looked at ‘local efficiency’ – how well information is shared within a spatially confined set of brain regions – and also ‘global efficiency,’ which reflects how many steps are required to transfer information from any one region to any other region in the network. If your network is more efficiently configured, then it should be easier, on average, to access relevant information and the task should take you less time.”

Forbes.com

Finally, to keep your brain functioning at full capacity you need one more thing.

Sleep

Without sleep, your brain can’t function. You will have difficulty with memory and learning. Studies have shown that sleep clears waste by-products of the brain’s activities, including beta-amyloid, the protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Sleep allows for the hippocampus, to transfer memories to the cerebral cortex for long term storage. A repeated pattern of learning and sleep allows for long term memory storage. This allows the hippocampus to retain new information.

To stay healthy your brain and body have the same requirements. Get enough regular exercise, eat a healthy diet and have a good night’s sleep.

Change your mind, change your health

Shayla