Researchers trained 24 rats to run a maze and then assigned them to a diet enriched with or without the omega-3 DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and with or without a sugar solution.  Six weeks later, rats ran the maze again from memory. The results: omega-3s boosted memory and sugar water hampered it.

“Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think,” said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a professor of integrative biology and physiology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. “Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain’s ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage.”

According to Dr. Gomez-Pinilla, eating too much fructose (a sugar found in cane sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and fruit) could block insulin’s ability to regulate how cells use and store sugar for the energy required for processing thoughts and emotions.

“Insulin is important in the body for controlling blood sugar, but it may play a different role in the brain, where insulin appears to disturb memory and learning,” he said. “Our study shows that a high-fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body. This is something new.”

The UCLA study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Gomez-Pinilla’s lab will next examine the role of diet in recovery from brain trauma.

Click here for additional research updates from the UCLA Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology.

Sugar Sours Memory, Fish Oil Enhances The Saturday Evening Post

For those who have read Bissinger’s outspoken column in The Daily Beast or follow him on Twitter, it might be hard to believe he could run out of words. This humbling confession is one of many honest moments Bissinger shares in Father’s Day: A Journey Into the Mind of My Extraordinary Son.

Titled appropriately after his son, Zach, the first chapter introduces his son as a lovable, simple 24-year-old man who will always be a grocery bagger. It is also the first of many times Bissinger will refer to the shame and subsequent guilt he feels for having a son born with brain damage.

Through a series of IQ and personality tests, doctors were unable to give Bissinger a one-word catchall for his son’s condition, though many tried: autism, Tourette’s syndrome, and mini-seizures were just a few suggested. Bissinger confesses he’s saved all these pieces of partial diagnoses, hoping to find a “cure” to make his son “normal.”

In an attempt to better understand his son, Bissinger decides he will take Zach on an unconventional westward journey. Unlike most family road trips fettered to national landmarks and museums, Father’s Day takes a chronological journey through Zach’s “literal landscape”: Chicago, Milwaukee, Odessa, and Los Angeles. The stops Bissinger has chosen hold personal significance for Zach; they are cities filled with people he knows.

Zach is the perfect navigator — he loves maps and was born with a memory that doesn’t forget. Routes, people, events, and dates are stored forever on his “hard drive.” As they travel into the cities of their past, Zach regales these concrete facts, “I remember David Jackson he worked with you as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune I remember his desk it was near yours…”

Bissinger’s memories in contrast are weighted with feelings of pain and guilt: the birth of his premature twins, struggles in his writing career, his divorce from Zach’s mother, and a lack of closure surrounding his parents’ deaths. These memories are woven into the plot as they venture further west, and Bissinger tries to gauge Zach’s feelings regarding all of them. In the end it is Zach’s action that brings Bissinger peace in an unlikely place: Los Angeles, the city where he experienced his most “personal and professional failure.”

Father’s Day: A Journey Into the Mind & Heart of My Extraordinary Son is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and from Amazon at a list price of $26.00.

Book Review: Father’s Day: A Journey Into the Mind & Heart of My Extraordinary Son The Saturday Evening Post

Brian

Plainfield, Indiana

Small studies suggest that at least one of the ingredients in Procera AVH (the flower extract vinpocetine) promotes blood circulation and oxygen delivery to the brain. The FDA says that Lipogen PS, a soy-derived nutrient found in brain cells, is “generally recognized as safe” for consumption and also approved a qualified health claim that the product may “reduce the risk of cognitive dysfunction in the elderly.” That’s good, but there’s no definitive proof that it (or Procera) boosts mental function. PS (phosphatidylserine) occurs naturally in fish, green leafy vegetables, soybeans, and rice. Procera AVH (proceraavh.com) and Lipogen PS (lipogen.co.il) supplements each cost about $50 per bottle of 60 doses taken up to three times daily and come with a money-back guarantee.

Memory Boosters The Saturday Evening Post