Question: what food is the best for your brain

Ellen Smith answered on 3 Mar 2021:

It’s difficult to pick one food that would be best, when looking at the impact of food on cognitive performance you can look at it in a few ways. One way is to look at specific diet types that people consume (these often differ between cultures), or another is to look at individual elements of diets like a particular fruit or vegetable, or even a compound that’s found within them.
Quite a lot of research has looked at the Mediterranean diet (that people typically eat in Italy and surrounding countries). This diet has high intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, olive oil and fatty fish (like salmon). They also eat low amounts of red meat, potatoes and processed foods. Research has shown that eating this type of diet can have a lot of health benefits, like preventing cardiovascular disease, reducing mortality and improving cognitive function.
If you were to look at individual food types instead, there’s a lot of work looking at different polyphenols (compounds that are found in fruit and vegetables), omega 3 (found in fish) and micronutrients (like B vitamins). Each of these has been shown to improve cognitive function.