It seems like every time I turn around there’s another cool study on omega-3s, this time linking neurotic behavior to low levels of omega-3s in the blood. Researchers looked at measures of anxiety, angry hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsivity and vulnerability.

Amazingly, all but ‘vulnerability’ correlated with omega-3 and omega-6 concentrations in the blood. Folks that had more of a specific omega-3, called EPA, had better scores (less neurotic) and those with higher levels of an omega-6, called AA, had worse scores (more neurotic). The studies, published by Conklin et al. in Psychosomatic Medicine, are the first to link the omega fats to neuroticism in otherwise healthy adults.

It’s all in the Balancing Act.

I have written several articles in the past talking about the importance of maintaining a good omega-3 to omega-6 balance in your diet. In light of the new data associating both types of omegas with neuroticism, in opposite directions, a few more details seem pertinent.

First off, you can’t really label omega-3s as ‘good’ and omega-6s as ‘bad’. We need them both, but we need them in balance. Nutritionists believe that the perfect balance lies somewhere between 1:1 and 1:5 of 3s to 6s, and this is probably what we ate throughout most of history, up to about 100 years ago.

Today, the average western diet is about 1:20 in favor of omega-6s. This has created an imbalance and a need for more 3s and less 6s, which has earned the 6s a reputation as ‘bad’. But like I said, you need them both.

For one example, omega-6s help turn the immune system on. Without them, you can’t mount much of a defense against bacterial invaders. But, too much of them and the immune system may get out of control and lead to excessive inflammation. Unfortunately, this seems to be exactly what is happening in many westerners and may underlie a lot of things, like heart disease, some cancers and even Alzheimer’s dementia.

On the flip side of that, if you over-do the omega-3s and cut out all the 6s (tough to do in the western diet) then your blood may get too thin, unable to coagulate and lead to bleeding disorders.

So like I said….balance is key. Since omega-6s are found in high amounts in corn oil and many other common vegetable oils, we get plenty of those. Omega-3s on the other hand are found mostly in fish and fish oil supplements, as well as a few uncommon oils, like flaxseed. So, it’s still wise to try to increase your omega-3s and reduce your 6s because of the foods we typically eat. Personally, I take a fish oil supplement and plan to continue that.

The Long and Short of It.

One other point needs addressing regarding omega-3s. You see them everywhere: on cereal boxes, crackers, and all kinds of processed foods. But, this isn’t really what you want. Omega-3s come in different forms, from short to long.

The short forms are what you get out of flaxseed and other vegetable oils that have good amounts of omega-3s (some of these are also high in 6s, which the products don’t advertise). However, it’s the long forms that are required for brain health and that seem to be protective against depression and neuroticism in recent studies.

Some animals can eat the short forms and convert them to long forms, but humans aren’t very good at that. Cows and chickens, on the other hand, do okay, which is another health reason for eating free-range beef and poultry. Their meats are higher in omega-3s. If the cows and chickens eat grain feed (mostly corn) they load up on omega-6s. If they eat grasses they load up on omega-3s.

Still, the best source of long chain omega-3s are fish or fish oil supplements. Fish are great at converting short chain to long chain AND they eat a lot of long chain omega-3s as well. The other alternative is to eat the stuff that fish eat, like marine algae or insects, but I think I’ll stick to the fish source.

Reference: Psychosomatic Medicine (2007), 69:932-34

A new study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine links intake of beta-carotene (a pre-form of vitamin A found in carrots) to improved cognitive performance in later life. We have appreciated the benefits of vitamin A in brain development for a long time. But until now, the beneficial role in the adult brain has been less obvious.

The power of the new study is that it followed participants in a controlled study for 18 years, from about 55 to 73 years old on average. This provides the ability to really look at long-term affect.

Time is Too Short

The difficulty with many nutrition studies, especially those looking at cognitive health, is that they are too short. Many vitamins probably help maintain brain health due to their anti-oxidant properties, allowing them to prevent or slow age-related decline of the brain. These affects may take many years or even decades to be become apparent because your brain doesn’t go belly-up overnight.

Several studies in the past have failed to show the cognitive benefits of vitamin supplements, but most of them were only a few years long. Grodstein et al., who authored the new study, actually looked at groups that participated anywhere from 1 to 18 years.

Although they found no observable cognitive benefit of vitamin A supplementation after 5 years, the benefit was clear by 15 years. Most other controlled studies have been much shorter, with a few making it to the 9-year mark at best. This may be a reason for lack of positive results in the past.

There are many ‘observational’ studies that support the cognitive benefits of taking vitamins, but these are typically plagued with other possible explanations. For example, people who take vitamins also exercise more, smoke and drink less, eat better, and generally limit their vices to a number they can count on one hand.

Control Freaks (make good scientists)

The new study by Grodstein et al. is exciting because it presents some of the first data with a controlled study, large groups of people, and a long time course. The researchers looked at about 1,000 people per group for the short-term study (1-3 years) and about 2,000 people per group for the long-term study (up to 18 years).

Although the authors did not directly link vitamin supplementation to reducing Alzheimer’s disease, the cognitive skills they measured are relevant to those that decline in dementia. Also, previous studies in animals have shown that vitamin A may help prevent some of the problems in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease progression.

Too Much of a Good Thing

There is no magic bullet for preventing disease, but the new study suggests that vitamin A is beneficial for life-long brain health. This doesn’t mean you should dose up on vitamin A, however, because it is toxic at high levels. A safe form found in quality nutritional supplements is beta-carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A as it is needed.

Still, no nutrients work all by themselves. A good quality multi-vitamin that contains optimal levels of beta-carotene along with all the other essential vitamins is a good way to go. You can learn more about specific high quality products that we recommend through the nutrition tab at the top of this page.

A new study from the University of Michigan reveals the value of socializing for enhancing brain fitness. The study will be published in February 2008, but you can access a podcast below, with Oscar Ybarra, a UM psychologist and study author.

The study, conducted in 2 parts, associated social activity with increased performance on cognitive tests. The authors evaluated a few thousand people for the time they spent socializing with friends, family and colleagues. They found that increased socializing time predicted better performance on cognitive tests, including working memory.

This part of the study, like many human studies, can’t say that increased socializing actually makes you smarter. It may be that people who do better on those tests are just more likely to socialize and that there is no causative relationship.

However, the second part of the study addressed this question. In this part, researchers divided volunteers into three groups. The first group spent ten minutes socializing before taking a test. The second group played mentally challenging games for ten minutes preceding the test. The third group watched ten minutes of ‘Seinfeld’ prior to the test.

The results showed that socializing worked as well as mentally challenging games on improving test performance. They were both better than watching TV (of course another interpretation is that socializing and mind games do nothing but Seinfeld makes you dummer, sorry Jerry).

In any case, this supports the notion that socializing may be causative for improving mental performance, at least in the short term. It would be interesting to see what the long-term brain boosting benefits are.

Other studies in the past have also correlated increased social support networks with reducing stress and maintaining brain function.

The bottom line? Get involved in life. Interacting with other people helps you keep your brain running sharp.

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In a recent Nature Letters article, Batterham and colleagues demonstrated how a hormone released by the stomach tells our brain when we’re full.

I know you’re wondering, “why is this interesting”?

I’ll tell you, but first let’s talk about a couple of types of hunger.

The Need to Feed

Of course, we have our run of the mill hunger because you haven’t eaten recently. This is dictated by signals that come from your energy reserves (i.e. fat) and stomach when it is empty. This is considered homeostatic (which means, maintaining equilibrium or balance) regulation of hunger and is the process that helps us maintain adequate nutrient and energy stores we need for survival.

The Pining for Pie

On the other hand there is hedonic (pleasure seeking) hunger. This is what is going on after you’ve had an appetizer, your entrée, a piece of pie and have decided to give the “death by chocolate, black-forest, triple-fudge, rum-cake” a taste. By that point you’re not hungry, but who could pass up a cake like that!?!?!

And it tastes good, so you eat it. Even though you know you won’t be able to bend over and tie your shoes if one of you laces comes undone (which is why loafers are a must).

Many other factors can stir up this type of hunger, and you may have heard it referred to as “emotional eating.” The point is that you don’t need food in this case, but you want it. And when you give in to the wanting (hedonic) hunger too often, you’ll certainly start to pack on the pounds, unless you are making substantial efforts to burn off those extra calories.

Brain, Brain Go Away, So I Can Eat Some More Today

So… back to why this is interesting! Well, homeostatic and hedonic eating are regulated by different circuits in the brain. A hormone called peptide-YY helps the stomach tell the brain that it’s full.

Our brains are, usually, pretty good at “putting the brakes” on unnecessary or risky behaviors. In line with this, the new study shows that the area of the brain that controls homeostatic eating is activated by Peptide-YY.

In addition, the authors were able to show that Peptide-YY activated a region of the brain that “puts the brakes” on the rewarding feeling that occurs with hedonic eating even though they hadn’t eaten for over 14-hours.

Well, that’s fantastic, but people probably don’t want to inject themselves with Peptide-YY to stave off the munchies…….I know I don’t.

So is there a way that we could “optimize” the levels of Peptide-YY by modifying our behavior? And in this way we could eat what we “need,” without venturing too far into the “wanting” side of eating?

I’m so glad you asked.

Although only a handful of studies have been conducted it appears that eating foods that are more slowly digested help elevate Peptide-YY levels. This basically suggests that we should stay away from food that contains lots of processed sugar.

Now I’m a fan of the aforementioned cake, so I’m not saying don’t eat it. But perhaps we could stack the deck in favor of not overeating by making sure we have our veggies and grains, eating a bit more slowly, and NOT having desert first!

I’m writing this post from the international neuroscience conference in San Diego where I’m hanging out with 32,000 of my closest friends. I wanted to summarize a few of the many cool things that came out of this conference relevant to Brain Fitness.

Why can’t computers be more like brains?

The conference kicked off with a talk by Jeff Hawkins, creator of the Palm Pilot and Handspring’s Trio. Jeff has now started the Redwood Neuroscience Institute and is working on figuring out how to teach machines to learn. His presentation called ‘Why can’t computers be more like brains’ was a fascinating look at how intelligence is organized into smaller chunks of knowledge.

I can’t cover everything he talked about in a brief post, but if your interested in this area you can pick up his new book, On Intelligence. Personally, I expect great things to come from Jeff’s future efforts in this area, which will benefit both computer and human brains.

Engage in life, protect your brain

Another very cool talk I attended dealt with methods of preventing Alzheimer’s disease (at least in mice for now). L.H. Tsai gave a great presentation about the benefits of ‘environmental enrichment’ on preventing cognitive decline in mice genetically programmed to develop dementia.

Environmental enrichment essentially involves placing mice in cages where they have a lot of complex toys and things to explore. This keeps them mentally active. The human analogy would be constantly seeking out new experiences and staying engaged in life.

It turned out that environmental enrichment had a huge benefit in keeping mice from developing signs of Alzheimer’s disease, even when they were genetically programmed to do so. This is further support for seeking out life-long learning and consistent with the studies on cognitive reserve that I have discussed before. Tsai brought a much deeper understanding of why this is true at the neurochemical level, which may help in future treatment of the disease in humans.

Fish and exercise team up for brain health

Finally, relevant to previous posts on this site and over at the Brain Code, there were many presentations on the brain boosting benefits of omega-3s. A couple of particular interest from Gomez-Pinilla’s group at UCLA, looked at exercise and omega-3s working together.

In one of their studies, they showed that supplementation with omega-3s and exercise improves cognitive function better than either of them alone. More than that, they synergize, which means the benefit of them together is better than just adding the benefit of each of them separately.

Their second study showed that omega-3s and exercise work together to protect the brain from traumatic brain injury. We already knew that people who exercise recover better from traumatic brain injury - but the new study suggests that omega-3 supplementation makes that benefit even stronger.

All in all, it was a great conference with literally thousands of presentations. It was especially good to see that lifestyle approaches to treating cognitive decline and maintaining brain health are moving more into the spotlight. It seemed that there was more emphasis on diet, exercise and sleep than in past conference years. Hopefully, the medical community will perk up and listen to scientists doing this work.

A couple of new reports came out this week addressing sleep in our culture. Everyone knows that they feel a little cranky when they don’t get enough sleep. It’s therefore no surprise that sleep affects your mood. What may be surprising, though, is that scientists know very little about why that’s true.

We understand quite a bit about why sleep disrupts your immune function, your metabolism and your ability to learn and remember things. I have discussed each of these in past articles over at our sister site, the Brain Code. But we don’t know much about how sleep regulates mood. An interesting new study published in Current Biology by Michael Walker, sheds some light on this subject.

A loss of reason

A complex brain circuit that involves both higher thinking centers and reactive centers controls your emotions. It’s the higher thinking centers that separate us from other animals. We have the ability (although we don’t always use it) to evaluate our responses thoughtfully, before just reacting impulsively.

In the new study, volunteers were either deprived of a good night’s sleep or allowed to sleep normally. Researchers then looked at both their higher thinking and their reactive brain centers after presenting them with some emotionally negative images to stir their reactions.

They found that specific reactive centers of the brain acted the same whether or not the volunteers had slept well the night before. But certain higher thinking centers responsible for keeping those reaction centers under control, were much less active in the sleep deprived group.

The interpretation of this is that our ‘gut reactions’ are not really that affected by lack of sleep (at least in this situation) but our ability to reason and monitor those reactions is weakened, which can have all kinds of downstream consequences.

Is a longer workday productive?

Why is this important? Other studies show that we are getting far less sleep today than we did a century ago and throughout history. The advent of artificial light has extended the length of our daily ‘productivity’, but many argue that this is actually counter-productive. By not getting optimal sleep, we are decreasing our ability to function efficiently the next day, and actually getting less done.

In fact, another study just released shows exactly that. In this one, researchers, Patricia Murphy and Scott Campbell, showed that napping is actually productive. First of all, midday napping did not cause people to sleep less well at night, as many believe. Second, midday napping improved performance on math, decision-making and reaction-time tests. This increased performance was true after the nap and lasted all the way into the next day, following the nap.

Many of us are so busy that we steal hours from our sleep to attempt to get more done. But science argues that we are not getting more done this way. We are actually reducing our ability to be creative, make decisions, work efficiently and cooperate with other people. Perhaps a little more time invested in our rest could dramatically improve our career and personal relationships.

References:

The human emotional brain without sleep — a prefrontal amygdale disconnect Current Biology 78(20) R877-878

Nap Now, Sleep Tonight — And Think Better Tomorrow http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071027172903.htm