Looking for a boost in performance and brain power?
Then the answer might just lie in your diet. By getting the right nutrients in your diet, it’s possible to greatly enhance your brain health in the short term, as well as to reinforce it for the long term – ensuring that you can still perform well as you get older.
So what are the best nutrients for enhancing brain power? Let’s take a look at some of the most important additions to your diet, if you want to bring your ‘A Game’ every single time.
Omega 3 Fatty Acids
Omega 3 fatty acids have tons of amazing health benefits that impact on pretty much every aspect of your health. In the brain, the big advantage of omega 3 is that it can improve something called ‘cell membrane permeability’. This is because the brain will use omega 3 in order to formulate cell walls – and your cell walls are what neurotransmitters, nutrients and currents need to pass through. In other words, when you consume omega 3 fatty acids, you can improve communication across the brain to get a little more speed from your thoughts.
Amino Acids
Amino acids are the constituent parts that make up proteins. When you consume protein in the form of meat, eggs or anything else, your brain will break it down into the raw amino acids that can then be recombined.
This is important for general health because amino acids are what the body uses to rebuild tissue – like muscle. They’re also important for your brain in particular though because they’re what are used to make many of the all-important neurotransmitters that are used to help you remember things, to improve your mood and generally to change your cognitive ‘state’ at any given time.
Some of the most useful include l-tyrosine, which increases dopamine and tryptophan which is used to synthesis serotonin.
Eggs
Eggs are an incredibly important thing to get in your diet for your brain because they’re rich in amino acids. In fact, eggs are the only ‘complete protein’, meaning that they contain 100% of the essential amino acids that the body needs to perform every function.
What’s more though, is that eggs are also high in something called choline. Choline is mega important because it is what the brain uses to make ‘acetylcholine’ – one of the key excitatory neurotransmitters in the brain.
Beetroot Juice
Beetroot juice can give you an instant upgrade in mental performance by acting as a vasodilator. This means that it will increase the diameter of your blood vessels (veins and arteries), thereby enabling more blood to flow around your body. Perhaps the best example is vinpocetine, which is a vasodilator that acts primarily on the brain, helping to bring more oxygen and blood there to improve your performance.
Cognitive Metabolic Enhancers
Finally, a cognitive metabolic enhancer is something that increases the energy efficiency of your brain cells. A great example of this is lutein, which has been shown to increase the performance of your mitochondria, thereby giving your cells just a little more energy to keep going throughout the day.
