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How to Feed Your Mind« Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Next Page »
Featured Recipe: Sardines on Crackers
The Baby Brain My intellectual journey began in the far reaches of northern Quebec, in a smattering of small villages on the frigid coast of Hudson Bay. No roads connect the villages to each other or to southern Canada, so when Joseph Jacobson, Ph.D., of Michigan’s Wayne State University and his intrepid crew of researchers first arrived 12 years ago, they flew in on small propeller planes from Montreal. Jacobson studies the Inuit, and he does so for just about the same reason cardiovascular disease researchers have been interested in other northern communities for years: their diet. “The Inuit eat a lot of fish,” says Jacobson from his Detroit office. “Arctic char, a type of salmon, is very big in their diet. And it’s all very rich in DHA.” DHA, or docosahexaenoic acid, a long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid in the omega-3 family that’s found in fish and their roe (particularly fattier types like salmon and sardines) is the magic nutrient du jour. I have seen literally hundreds of studies investigating its power to prevent cardiovascular disease. Now the focus has turned to the brain: dozens of studies report that mother animals deprived of DHA have offspring with memory, sensory and visual problems, and that supplementing them with DHA improves their performance on learning, memory and problem-solving tasks. This makes intuitive sense: DHA forms the backbone of much of the brain cells’ membranes. Jacobson wanted to see whether higher DHA levels, both in the womb and after birth, could have the same positive effect on human infants. So working with midwives in the three largest Hudson Bay villages, his team collected umbilical cord blood from 109 newborns. They analyzed the DHA concentration in their cord blood (a good measure of how much DHA the mother consumed during her last few months of pregnancy), and then tested how well the infants performed on tests throughout their first year. He found that at 6 months and 11 months, infants whose cord blood had the highest concentrations of DHA performed better on a number of different tests—such as recognizing faces—than those with lower levels. “The mother’s intake during the third trimester, when the brain’s neurons and synapses are developing at a very rapid rate, is most important. When we focused on that period, we found the most evidence of beneficial effects,” he says. My mother certainly didn’t eat salmon while pregnant with me, so that could be my problem, but it’s doubtful: my memory problems only emerged recently. Luckily for my son, my OB/GYN is on top of the literature: when she found out that I couldn’t stomach salmon or other fatty fish, she recommended taking a DHA supplement during my third trimester. (Pregnant mothers are advised to get 300 milligrams per day—the equivalent of about three to four 3-ounce servings of salmon a week.) Apparently, much of the rest of the country isn’t too fond of fatty fish either. “Most populations, and this is particularly true in the U.S. and southern Canada, are not getting nearly the amount of DHA that humans got prehistorically,” says Jacobson, who like many in his field believes that before the agricultural revolution, fish played a much more prominent role in our diets. “In our original environment, we were getting a lot of DHA,” he comments, “then we switched over to a more grain-based diet.” « Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Next Page »
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