The ten billion nerve cells of your brain process such accountable amounts of information each second, they make our most advanced computers look like children's toys. Your brain controls everything, from the merest wiggle of toes, to the moment-to-moment balancing of hundreds of hormones, the microscopically regulated metabolism of all thirty trillion cells that enable you to think, feel, and behave as a human being. When even a few thousand brain cells get damaged or die, your whole body suffers.
As progressive brain damage accumulates, from poor nutrition, bodily pollution, over use of man-made drugs, and lack of exercise, intelligence declines, memories fade, muscles atrophy, bones weaken, immunity disappears, and you become aged and easy prey for every passing disease.
The ultimate solution to disease clearly lies in preventing degeneration of the brain. By now much of medical science is pointed in that direction. The good news is, that even now recent nutrition science has discovered significant ways to maintain and even improve brain function.
The first brain function to go is memory, beginning in Mr. Average at about age 30 and accelerating after age 40. You can change your behavior, improve your skills, enhance your life, only to the extent that you can store information in long-term memory and recall it. If that capacity declines, you become an automaton, unable to learn anything new, forever re-enacting the habits and memories of an increasingly distant past.
To prevent this decline it is neccessary to know a little about the structure of the nerves (neurons) in the brain. Each neuron consists of a stringy filament called an (axon). The dendrite carries nerve impulses towards the cell body, and the axon carries them away again. The nerve impulses carry the information much like the electrical impulses that carry your spoken information along a phone line.
Unlike phone lines however, neurons are all unconnected to each other. The end of the axon of each neuron stops near the end of the dendrites of other neurons. The gap between the axon and neighboring dendrites is called a (synapse). Transmission of nerve impulses across the synapse is accomplished chemically by neurotransmitters, compounds that flow from the axon to the neighboring dendrites. Two of these compounds known to be involved in memory are (serotonin and acetylcholine). Both are formed from specific essential nutrients that your body cannot make. You must obtain them from your diet.
BEST FOODS FOR YOUR BRAIN:
Wild salmon: Is not only an incredible food for brain health, it qualifies as incredible across virtually every other health standard as well and is clearly one of the healthiest foods that one can eat.
It's also important to know that only WILD salmon has been shown to contain the highest levels of the good stuff that your brain & body crave...as wild-caught fish grow and evolve their muscles, tissues and fat levels the hard way, fighting for survival of the fittest in the oceans and rivers. By contrast, many or most farm-raised salmon exist in a locked-up, artificial and sometimes contaminated environment and thus have to be fed food (or worse, color added later just before going to market!) to make them LOOK orange and healthy instead of white and sickly!
Cacao Beans: This amazing hedonistic bean is one of the world's longest-revered foods (think 'time of the Aztecs' old) and has in recent years been shown to be a veritable powerhouse of cognitive enhancement, mood and bliss-enhancement (thanks in part to the Theobromine in cacao), antioxidants, flavonoids, catechins and many other brain & body-enhancing elements. In fact, chocolate has been very recently cited by some top health professionals and researchers to be THE single most exciting health food, and as more research continues to pour in, the more true this appears to be TRUE!
Most candy and chocolate bars contain not only low levels of cacao bean compared to other unhealthy ingredients such as sugars, milk fat, artificial flavorings and so on, but the quality and processing of the cacao used in these products is often of low health benefits due to everything from alkalization to refining and processing and over-roasting the healthy elements right out of the beans.
Blueberries: It didn't seem fair to leave this time-honored, well-researched superfood off the list, particularly given its reputation as the 'brain berry' and its wide availability in fresh, original form (compared to Acai). And given how relatively easy it is to add blueberries to your daily diet, the combination of proven health benefits with ready availability make it a no-brainer to consider eating blueberries daily if possible. Think about it: what would your brain health, brain abilities, disease/risk profile, and overall health be like 5 or 10 or 20 years from now if you consumed blueberries every day? Exactly...
Coffee Beans: Last but not least...So where's the controversy and confusion? The problem comes in when coffee is combined with other unhealthy things, as is so commonly done: triple-carmel-double-whip chocolate-creme-mocha-blast-freeze drinks, weak over-extracted brewed cheap poor quality coffee, coffee loaded up with artificial cream and sweeteners, you know the drill. Compare such carb, chemical and fat-laden concoctions with, say, a high-quality organic coffee freshly ground into an Espresso-grade powder and served as a couple shots of fresh espresso, straight? No comparison. This should be obvious, but surprisingly, many or even most people still don't get it.
But generally speaking, the coffee bean is a safe, true superfood. And when properly consumed in ideal forms (such as pure Espresso), it's one uniquely enjoyable beverage that also packs a host of brain and health-friendly properties to boot!