By Pamela Harding

News reports and ad campaigns tout blueberries one day and apples the next as the super-powered brain food du jour. This makes for great stories and certainly grabs people’s attention, but can some foods really make you more intelligent, have smarter kids, improve your memory, help you think more clearly, and perhaps even forestall the onset of those so-called “senior moments”—or worse, dementia?

The answer is yes, provided you take a balanced, holistic approach to nutrition and don’t get hung up on magic-bullet thinking—the belief that eating specific foods—or even supplements of isolated components found in some foods—is going to instantly boost your brain power or make your kid a genius.

“It’s all about balance and moderation,” says Patrick Sullivan, PhD, Associate Professor, Geriatrics, at Duke University’s Department of Medicine. Sullivan says that so-called brain foods also deliver nutrients that are good for your heart, liver, and kidneys. “The body was designed to use a variety of building blocks in foods to maintain optimal health overall—not to use one for the brain or heart or one specifically for the kidney,” he explains. “You really need to regularly eat a variety of foods that are good for you.”
For Sullivan, foods is the operative word. “If you don’t eat the whole food, you may be missing out on cofactors that enable the beneficial factors within the foods to do their jobs properly.”

Another important message: Start early. “Much of the discussion of nutrition and brain health is linked with infants and kids¾the sooner good nutrition comes into play in a person’s life, the better the payout,” says Susan Moores, RD, a nutrition expert in St. Paul, Minnesota. She stresses the importance of good nutrition even before a woman becomes pregnant. It’s never too late to improve your diet, says Moores. However, if you don’t adopt a healthy diet until you’re 65, you probably won’t get “nearly as big a benefit as if you had started earlier.”

That said, a substantial body of research—much of it conducted on laboratory animals—links specific foods, or certain chemical compounds in those foods, to brain function and behavior. And while slam-dunk conclusions await further research, the direction is clear: Regularly incorporating a variety of these health-enhancing foods in your diet is likely to help you function at your personal best.

Antioxidants against aging
When you talk about getting “rusty” at certain tasks, you may not be far off. Oxidation, the process that causes metal to rust, can also damage your brain cells. And that’s not all. “Every major disease you can think of with respect to aging has an oxidative stress and inflammatory component—dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s—you name it,” says James Josephs, PhD, chief of the neurosciences laboratory at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. Antioxidants—vitamins C, E, A, and other compounds in foods—can help curtail the damage by disarming potentially harmful free radicals.

Josephs’ research shows that some antioxidative compounds in the foods we eat have a direct affinity for specific areas of the brain: Ellagitannins in raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries are found in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory control area. Proanthocyanins in blueberries, purple grapes, red grape juice, and red wine gravitate toward the striatum, which is more closely associated with spatial memory. The implication? These compounds may enhance the performance of those specific