Consumption of fish has brain boosting benefits.

When I was a young tike, I used to watch a pretty good amount of Sesame Street.  Unlike today’s crop of shows geared for children, Sesame Street had—and has—some redeeming qualities, as various segments in their hour programs taught young kids how to read, write, and eat healthy (except for maybe those “C is for Cookie” bits performed by the Cookie Monster).

For whatever reason, I remember one particular segment that showed a young boy out with his father on an ice fishing expedition.  I think I remember the segment because, being a pre-schooler at the time, it’d never dawned on me that people actually went out fishing in the dead of winter.

At any rate, by the end of the segment, the boy says something that I’ve always remembered: 

…And boy, do I like fish!

Weird thing to remember, huh?  To this day, I don’t know why I’ve remembered this innocuous comment, but it segues nicely into a new study that was recently released in the March issue of the journal Acta Paediatrica.

According to the study, teenage boys that eat fish once a week or more perform better on cognitive tests than infrequent fish finaglers. 

But the positive effects on brain function aren’t relegated to short-term improvements in spatial and factual knowledge, as previous studies have demonstrated.  These scientists tested how, or if, the brain improved three years down the road.  In other words, how did the boys’ brain function fare by their 18th birthdays?

The results?  Brain boosting benefits of fish last (too bad the same can’t be said for fish freshness).  The Swedish researchers found that boys who ate fish more than twice a week averaged a score that was 12 percent higher than boys who ate fish less than once a week.  That was on overall intelligence scores, though.  When the results were broken down to verbal and visuospatial skills (for example, the skills we use to decipher what puzzle piece fits with another), fish fans scored 9 percent higher on the former and 11 percent higher on the latter (again, as compared to those who ate fish less than once a week).

And before you go off thinking this was a small scale study that didn’t take into account contributing factors, well, factor this:  the study involved approximately 4,000 15-year-old boys, 58 percent of whom ate fish, 20 percent  on a regular basis (by “regular basis” I mean more than once a week).  And to make sure as few things as possible skewed the results, the researchers’ took into account possible contributing factors among all the volunteers, like the parents’ education level, how often they exercised, and where they lived (presumably because certain locales have better educational systems than others).

The results were so convincing to the researchers, it caused the study’s head honcho, Dr. Maria Aberg, to say something rarely heard among the scientific elite:  that there was a “very clear association” between regular fish consumption and improved cognition in boys’ late teen years (If you’re a regular reader of my columns, you know how often scientists hedge their bets with words like “may” and “possible,” so as not to put themselves in a corner should  their results turn out to be flawed.  Not the case here).

This is not to say that the good researchers from the University of Gothenburg have all the answers, though.  For instance, while salmon and mackerel are loaded with omega-3s – the long chain of fatty acids presumed to be the catalyst in turning fish food into brain food – they’re not convinced the leaner side of fish doesn’t provide the same brain benefit.

If your teenage boy hasn’t loved fish since pre-pubescence, chances are he’s not much of a fan of it today.  My advice is to have at it for dinner anyway.  He may not be a fan of salmon, but perhaps he’s a nut for halibut.  He may not crave crab, but perhaps he’s in love with lobster.  He may hate haddock, but he may adore albacore.

The point is, the more fish he’s exposed to, the greater the chances he’ll like one of them. 

Whatever that fish happens to be, his brain will eat it up!      

Source:
ScienceDaily

I’m sure you’ve heard of the methods some pregnant women use to turn their soon-to-be born babies into baby Einstein’s.  Some of them follow the research that says playing classical music from the likes of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven stimulates a baby’s brain development.  Others say just talking to your pre-born is the secret to baby braniacs. 

Of course, these methods have never been proven fail-safe methods; it’s very debatable as to their effectiveness from one case to another.  What isn’t debatable, though, is the adverse effect mercury has on a pre-born baby’s development.  Study after study links the level of mercury in a pregnant women’s blood stream to children’s learning disabilities and impaired brain development.  In light of this, many pregnant women swear off fish.  Because various fish are known to contain large to trace amounts of mercury, many pregnant women go the full nine months without eating a single thing culled from the ocean.  But new evidence suggests this might not be such a good idea, particularly when it comes to a child’s brain development.

Researchers came to this conclusion after taking blood samples from 350 pregnant women during their second trimester, asking them what their diets were like in those three months.  By the time their child turned 3 years of age, the formerly pregnant women had their kids take various tests for the researchers, tests that measured their speaking abilities and motor skills.  What they found was that the children with the best scores had mothers who ate fish regularly during their second trimester (more than twice a week). But findings like this fly in the face of U.S. health officials’ caution to pregnant mothers – avoid eating more than two servings of fish a week (i.e. more than 12 ounces).  The findings are published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

So, what’s a pregnant mother to do?  Well, one thing researchers suggest pregnant women not do is take health officials’ caution lightly; fish like mackerel, shark, red snapper and orange roughy have high amounts of mercury that pose risks to a baby’s overall development.  Just as the researchers’ findings indicated the more fish pregnant women ate the better their children performed on tests, it also showed that the higher mercury levels were, the worse their children performed on tests.  While not all of the women with high mercury levels ate fish, a quarter of those with high mercury levels did.

Now, this probably sounds like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth – eat more fish and you get smarter children; eat more fish and you run the risk of infecting your pre-born kids with mercury poisoning.  Which is it?  The key is to find fish that have low levels of mercury but high levels of omega-3 fatty acids – the fats believed responsible for healthy brain development.

While fish with high levels of mercury tend to also have high levels of omega-3s, there are fish that provide the best of both worlds.  One of them is salmon.  Salmon contains a .01 parts per million mercury level (ppm) and nearly two grams of omega-3s in a three ounce piece.  A close second is herring, containing .04 parts per million of mercury and roughly two grams of omega-3s for every three ounce piece.  Two other good bets are flounder or sole (.05 ppm, .48g omega-3s per three ounce piece) and pollack (.06 ppm, .45g omega-3s per three ounce piece). 

So, if you want a healthy heart and a bright child, swearing off fish entirely isn’t the answer.  Eating the safe kind of fish, however – two to three times a week – is.