"Benefits of Blueberries for the Brain"
When you search the medical literature
for studies on berries,
papers like this pop up: A blueberry,
… muffin rash, ahh…
Or, pictures of strawberry tongues,
or as a way to describe stool appearance,
though stools truly resembling currant jelly
are not very common.
What is it with pathologist’s
love affair with food terminology?
—the grossest of which may be
the way amoeba chest infections are described,
where you spit up pus that looks like
“anchovy sauce,” which sounds gross—
even without the pus.
There are actual studies on berry supplementation,
like on how they can mitigate
the negative effects of high saturated fat diet
on the brain and behavior,
but that was in mice.
Maybe a better way to mitigate would be
to not feed your pet mouse
a stick of butter in the first place.
Then, there are studies on proprietary berry-
based nutraceutical supplements,
purported to improve
cognitive performance.
See how there’s a steeper rise
in the supplement group?
Old hats will instantly recognize this
as the timeless trick
featured in the 1950’s classic,
How to Lie with Statistics.
See how they don’t start
the Y axis at zero?
That’s to inflate the appearance.
Correct the graph, and you can see
the effect doesn’t quite look so impressive.
There are studies of actual berries
on actual humans,
but when they’re funded by
berry industry trade groups,
you get studies like this:
an afternoon snack of berries reduces
subsequent energy intake.
Great!
But that’s compared to candy.
Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries—fantastic,
compared, to a handful of Jelly Babies,
which are just like coated gummy bears.
Do berries offer so little that you
have to compare them to candy
to make them look good?
There was that famous Harvard study
I did a video about where berry eating
appeared to delay brain aging by up to
2-and-a-half years, but you don’t know
if it’s cause-and-effect, until...
you put it to the test.
And, blueberry supplementation was
able to improve memory in older adults
in just 12 weeks’ time,
but that was feeding them up to
6 cups of wild blueberries a day.
Now, this was a proof-of-concept
pilot study just to see if they get any effect.
We just didn’t have any studies
using more realistic doses…
until now.
How about just a cup a day of blueberries?
They found that the addition of easily
achievable quantities of blueberries
to the diets of older adults can improve
some aspects of cognition,
like long-term memory.
In terms of the number of errors,
the placebo group got worse,
the blueberry group got better.
You can even correlate the cognitive improvements
with enhanced brain activation using
fancy brain scan technology to actually
visualize the improved blood flow
to those same regions of the brain
caused by the blueberry consumption.
Does it work in kids too?
Blueberry treatments have shown positive effects on cognition
in both rats and adult humans,
but do those these benefits transfer
to children—human children?
How about a randomized, double-blind
placebo- controlled study comparing
about a cup of blueberries,
to 2 cups,
to zero cups?
What did they find?
Cognitive performance improvements
across all measures,
and the more berries, the better.
And, this wasn’t after twelve weeks
of eating berries, but within hours
of just a single blueberry meal.
Sounds like a good breakfast any day
our kids are having their exams.