1206 Blueberries are brain food

Today we finished the 5 day class on "Mind Matters" taught by Sally Kriska here at Lakeside. The topic yesterday was the Teen-age brain, and today it was "The retiring mind." One of the tips that Sally passed along was the 10-24-7 tip. She said that in order to incorporate something into the long term memory, review it 10 minutes after hearing/reading it, then review in 24 hours, and then a week later. Then it is much more likely to make it to the long term memory, because most things drop out of our memory very quickly.

One day we covered nutrition. Blueberries kept coming up as brain food. So I looked it up, and discovered a USDA site that said pretty much what she said:

"It used to be thought that shortly after we are born that we had all of neurons that we were going to have throughout life and that no more new ones would be made. Now we know that during normal aging no neurons are lost and new ones are still being made (called neurogenesis) even into old age. However, it appears that the rate slows down. One brain region where this occurs is called the hippocampus, which is a major memory control area. . .

Previously, we showed that age-related declines in memory tasks can be improved by antioxidant-rich diets containing blueberries. In this study, to begin to understand the mechanisms responsible for the beneficial effects of blueberries, we assessed changes in hippocampal neurogenesis, activation of IGF-1, and ERK levels in blueberry-supplemented aged animals. The results showed that all of these measurements showed increases in the blueberry-supplemented as compared to control. Importantly, the results showed that these increases were significantly correlated with improvements in spatial memory. Therefore, cognitive improvements afforded by fruits such as blueberries, which are abundant in compounds called polyphenolics, may be regulated by their beneficial effects on hippocampal neurogenesis."

I've never been particularly fond of blueberries, but I can put them in a pie or a dish of mixed fruit.

However, never, never, never drop blueberries into packaged vanilla pudding. It contains yellow #5 & #6 food coloring, and as you learned in kindergarten, blue and yellow make green. Pea soup green pudding.