Brain Rules for Baby by John Medina Read Free Book Online Page B

needs, of course. The pregnant mom is a ship with two passengers but only one galley. And we’re looking to stock this kitchen with the right ingredients for brain growth. Of the 45 nutrients known to be necessary for growth of the body, 38 have been shown to be essential for neurological development. You can look on the back of most pregnancy-formulated vitamin supplements to see the list. We can look to our evolutionary history for some guidance on what to eat to get these nutrients. Since we know something of the climate through which we developed for millions of years—one that supported ever-increasing brain girth—we can speculate about the type of foods that helped it along.
     
    Caveman cuisine
    An old movie called Quest for Fire opens with our ancestors seated by a fire, munching on a variety of foods. Large insects buzz about the flames. All of a sudden, one of our relatives shoots out his arm, clumsily grabbing an insect out of thin air. He stuffs it into his mouth, munches heartily, and continues staring into the fire. His colleagues dig around the soil for tuberous vegetables and scrounge for fruit in nearby trees later in the movie. Welcome to the world of Pleistocene haute cuisine. Researchers believe that for hundreds of thousands of years, our daily diet consisted mostly of grasses, fruits, vegetables, small mammals, and insects. Occasionally we might fell a mammoth, so we would gorge on red meat for two or three consecutive days before the kill spoiled. Once or twice a year we might get sugar, running into a beehive, but even then only as unlinked glucose and fructose. Some biologists believe we are susceptible to cavities now because sugar was not a regular part of our evolutionary experience, and we never developed a defense against it. Eating this way today (well, except for the insects) is called in some circles the paleo diet.
    So, it’s a bit boring. And familiar. Eating a balanced meal, with a heavy emphasis on fruits and vegetables, is probably still the best
advice for pregnant women. For the non-vegetarians in the crowd, a source of iron in the form of red meat is appropriate. Iron is necessary for proper brain development and normal functioning even in adults, vegetarian or not.
     
    Miracle drugs
    There is a lot of mythological thinking out there about what you should and should not eat—not just during pregnancy but your whole life long. I had an honors student at the University of Washington, the thoughtful type of kid who has to sit on his hands not to answer a question. One day he came up to me after class, breathless. He was taking an entrance exam for medical school and had just found out about a“miracle” drug.“It’s a neurotonic!” he exclaimed.“It improves your memory. It’ll make you think better. Should I take it?” He thrust in front of my face an advertisement for ginkgo root.
    Derived from the ginkgo tree, ginkgo biloba has been advertised for decades as a brain booster, improving memory in both young and old, even treating Alzheimer’s. These claims are testable. A number of researchers began to study gingko as they would any promising pharmaceutical. Sorry, I told the student. Ginkgo biloba does not improve cognition of any kind in healthy adults—not memory, not visual-spatial construction, not language or psychomotor speed or executive function. “What about old people? my student asked. Nope. It doesn’t prevent or slow down Alzheimer’s or dementia. It can’t even affect normal age-related cognitive decline. Other botanicals, like St. John’s wort (purported to treat depression) show similar impotence. My student left, crestfallen. “The best thing you could do is get a good night’s sleep!” I hollered after him.
    Why is it that these nutrition myths can fool even bright kids like my student? First, nutrition research is really, really hard to do, and it is shockingly underfunded. The types of long-term, rigorous, randomized trials needed to establish