We all know that it is important to eat healthily, but did you know that the gut and brain are directly connected? This means what you eat can directly affect your mental health, concentration and memory.
In this week's episode of our Learn Better Podcast, host Stuart Pedley Smith, Head of Learning at Kaplan, explores how food and nutrition impacts your well-being, mood, and cognitive performance.
Our guest is Anjanette Fraser, an expert in Nutrition and founder of company The Natural Alternative Health & Wellbeing Ltd. She has been a registered nutritionist for 17 years but prior to this worked as a graduate in corporate finance, spending five years in mergers and acquisitions.
Anjanette explains how nutrition can impact our bodies, and what to look for when planning a diet that supports your mental health and cognitive performance.
Nutrition is one of the fundamentals. It’s the cornerstone. It’s the foundation of us, of our being.
Key topics
Nutrition and brain performance
We used to think that everything came down to genetics, but have discovered that nutrition is a modifying factor. Being healthy and eating well can in fact improve our life and well-being.
Your genes are not your destinity.
For a lot of students a short term goal can often be to improve focus and concentration, and we now know that what we eat can actually affect our memory and recall ability. To understand which foods will help you to optimise brain function, we need to look at the glycemic index. The glycemic index indicates how quickly foods release glucose into your system.
Low glycemic foods will give you a stable release of energy and help keep you fuller for longer. You can also look to eat something with high protein, fat or fibre to help slow the glucose release of high glycemic food, and help keep your energy levels from crashing.
How much water should you drink?
It is often stated that we should drink a set amount of water per day, but Anjanette explains how it can actually differ. No two days are the same, and you may need different amounts based on many different factors such as your activity, if it is summer or winter, the amount of salt you have consumed.
You also don't have to just drink water to increase hydration, you can also get a lot of liquid intake from foods like fruit and vegetables.
Personalising your diet
To begin to personalise your diet, the first thing you need to do is check in with yourself. You need to understand what you need, what you are doing and what is going to help you achieve your goals.
A lot of students often want to improve their focus and concentration and Anjanette shares how to create a pack lunch to help this.
- Start with a protein (chicken, salmon, eggs, feta or halloumi)
- Choose your source of carbohydrate, ideally a complex carb (brown rice or wholewheat pasta)
- Add in some vegetables, these can be frozen as they often have a higher nutritional value due to being frozen straight from harvest.
- If you would like to add some fat you can do with olive oil or nuts.
If you are vegan it can be a bit harder to find such protein dense food, so she suggests you may need to think about eating more regularly.
It is important to remember, one size doesn't fit all.