Brain Food

By Rianna Mergens

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What’s in the story?

When your mom tells you to eat your vegetables or packs you a healthy sandwich for lunch, she’s not only giving you food to help your body grow strong. She’s giving you food to help your brain grow strong too. Not eating enough food or eating only junk food when you are young can actually cause your brain to not function as well as it should. In the Public Library of Science Biology article “Compensatory Growth Impairs Adult Cognitive Performance,” scientists examined how poor nutrition when you are young can hurt your brain as an adult.

Food for Thought?

A good way to think about how the brain works is by comparing it to a computer. Both store information about many topics, and are made up of many parts that all help control different parts of the body.  Both computers and brains also need some sort of power to function, electricity for a computer and food for your brain. You might have noticed that if you don’t give your computer enough power, it might not run like normal. The scientists who wrote this article realized that the brain is kind of like a computer. It needs energy, but instead of using electricity it uses nutrients from your diet to function.

Just like you go from being small to being tall, your brain grows with you. To grow strong, your brain needs just the right amount of nutrients when you’re young so that it can function at its best as you grow older. Scientists know that poor nutrition leads to not enough power for the brain, but the scientists in this study were intersted in how that happened.

Hungry for “Brain Food”

To answer that question, scientists conducted an experiment with little birds called zebra finches. Scientists used sibling birds in the study, 2 brothers and 2 sisters. One of the brothers and one of the sisters was put on a healthy, normal diet right after they were hatched. The other brother and sister finches were placed on a very restricted diet, which means they were given much less food. Remember that less food means less nutrients to help the birds grow.

The scientists kept the birds on those diets for 20 days and recorded how the birds acted and how fast the birds grew. The researchers also tested how well the birds completed a simple task. In other words, scientists tested how well the birds’ brains worked. The task was to learn where food was located based on the color of the screen it was placed behind.

After the 20 days, researchers then let the little birds control their own diet. So the hungry finches could eat like normal. As the very small finches began to eat like normal, they grew very fast. Scientists recorded finches’ growth patterns and at the end of 50 days of normal eating, the scientists again had the finches perform a simple task that was similar to the first task. The finches had to learn which color screen scientists had placed food behind.

Scientists conducted the experiment to see what differences existed between normal finches brains and the brains of finches with poor nutrition when they were young. Scientists thought there might be differences in how well the birds performed based on the amount of food they received when young. They also noticed that when the hungry finches on a restricted diet grew into adults, it happened really, really fast. Could that also be responsible?

Bird Brains

The finches on a restricted diet started off life by growing at a much slower rate than their normal brothers and sisters. But when they were allowed to eat more, they grew at a much faster rate than the normally fed finches. This is called compensatory growth. Compensatory is a big word which means that the small, hungry finches were growing much faster because they were making up for all the growth they should have normally undergone. The finches that weighed so little after 20 days on a restricted diet had to grow really, really fast to catch up to their normal brothers' and sisters’ weight.

When they were young, the birds that were given less food did not perform learning activities any slower than their normal siblings. However, after the hungry birds grew so rapidly under compensatory growth, it took them much longer to learn how to complete the scientists’ task of finding the food. It was only after the compensatory growth that the hungry finches had trouble performing the simple task.

The results of the experiments allowed scientists to conclude that the period of rapid growth let the bodies of the birds catch up, but it did not let the birds’ brains grow at the same fast rate. In fact, the hungry birds’ ability to perform the task dropped, meaning they had learning delays as adults becuase of their poor nutrition early in life.

What does this mean for us?

It means you should try and eat healthy every day, especially when you are young and need those nutrients to grow a strong body and mind. If you aren’t eating well-balanced meals, it could mean brain problems as you grow older. So when your mom tells you to eat your vegetables to grow big and strong, believe what she says. You need those nutrients for a healthy body and a healthy brain.