Nutrition and the brain

Okay this is the last thing I have to say about this topic, and then I’m moving on!

I did a bit of research and found a couple of articles that I found helpful/interesting:

Neuroscience for kids- Nutrition and the brain

Your brain is like a car. A car needs gasoline, oil, brake fluid and other materials to run properly. Your brain also needs special materials to run properly: glucose, vitamins, minerals and other essential chemicals. For example, the fuel (energy) for your brain is glucose. You can get glucose by eating carbohydrates or other foods that can be converted to glucose.

Your brain must manufacture the right proteins and fats to do things such as grow new connections or add myelin, the fatty sheath to axons. You do this by digesting proteins and fats in food and using the pieces, that is, the amino acids and fatty acids, to make the new brain proteins and fats. Without the correct amount and balance of particular building blocks, your brain will not work properly. Too little (deficiency) or too much (overabundance) of the necessary nutrient can affect the nervous system.

One thing that I found of particular interest:

The Journey Into the Brain
Nutrients must follow a tricky pathway to your brain and overcome several challenges:

1. They must gain entry to your body: if you don’t eat them, they will not be available to your brain.
2. Once in your stomach, they must survive an attack by acid that breaks some foods down.
3. Further along the digestive tract, they must be absorbed through the cells lining the intestine and transported through blood vessel walls into the bloodstream.
4. Traveling in the blood through the liver, nutrients need to avoid being metabolized (destroyed).
5. Once in the bloodstream, nutrients must cross small blood vessels into brain tissue. This transport from the blood to neurons is restricted by the blood brain barrier.

You know how I keep talking about the size of the peptides in milk and wheat? And how they create a “leaky gut” (perforations in the lining of the intestines where stuff leaks out)? Well, here it mentions how it works! If there is a leaky gut, many nutrients are lost and cannot make it to the brain, where they are needed for many functions (particularly to create neurotransmitters).

There’s a lot more info out there. I’ll leave you to do some research to find out if you believe there is a connection between nutrition and brain development.

To close this subject, I just want to emphasize the reason I’ve been talking about this. There are so many things we cannot control with our kids – their skills, equipment, sometimes how much therapy they get, etc. But one thing most of us DO have control over that CAN help our kids is nutrition. I can’t say that better nutrition, removing milk, is going to be a miracle cure. It may be for some kids, but not for all. It definitely hasn’t been for Nathan. All I’ve noticied is a general increase in health, cognition, and well-being. But my belief is that these conditions give our kids a boost for other developmental gains. If your kids is spendinga lot of time sick, think of all the wasted therapy time, etc?? We all know that eating healthy makes our body healthy. Same with our kids. So this is just one piece of the puzzle, which may be significant for some, minor for others, but a part nonetheless.

Okay we’re off to CME, have a great weekend!