The adolescent diet: fundamental in learning
How do they influencefeeding in the capacity of knowing and understanding of adolescents? Studies show that diets rich in saturated fats can affect the cognitive development of adolescents, in addition to producing eating disorders and metabolic and cardiovascular diseases.
30 percent of the calories in a person's diet must come from fats, but excess calories cause alterations in memory and learning.
In adolescence, the child has been learning to establish emotional bonds and express their feelings, but it is at this stage that the person seeks your own identity and your autonomy thanks to cognitive maturity. The cognitive development of adolescents is based on their being able to elaborate an abstract thought, to maintain a reflective attitude towards reality, and to possess a memory capacity.
A healthy diet for learning
Adolescents must Take a balanced diet that promotes learning and in which there is no lack of breakfast. There are some foods that are essentially good for keeping you active and focused and replacing those high-fat foods that hinder cognitive ability. Nutritionists advise that in times of study it is good to take:
1 eggThanks to choline the connections between the neurons are strengthened.
2. Vegetables as beetroot, thanks to uridine monophosphate that favors the cognitive capacity, carrot, which facilitates memorization with the antioxidant and cauliflower, that acetylcholine to facilitate attention and learning.
3. Fish, rich in fatty acids such as salmon sardines or tuna.
4. Green tea, that with caffeine provides energy to your body and keeps you active.
Excess weight in adolescents harms the memory
A study conducted by the research group of the CEU San Pablo University, led by Nuria del Olmo and Mariano Ruiz-Gayo and presented at the Annual Congress of the Endocrine Society (San Francisco) has demonstrated this theory.
To prepare this experiment, they selected two groups of mice: one of them was given a diet in which 45 percent of calories came from saturated fats, and the second received a conventional diet that had the same number of calories as the previous one but in whose composition carbohydrates predominated.
Thus, experts have revealed that animals of adolescent age developed a certain obesity and presented important brain dysfunctions, especially related tomemory. In contrast, adult mice that received the same diet they did not suffer alterations of the memory, even though they were also obese.
Fats cause hormonal changes that affect learning
To test the memory of the mice, the experts used a"test" of space recognition in which an enclosure was used that contained two pieces of plastic: one of them known by the mice, and the other, unknown, to which the researchers changed their position in the enclosure.
This "test" is based on the fact that mice are more interested in new objects than in those already known, so that an animal capable of "remembering" an object spends more time exploring the new object than the old. In this way, it was found that those subjects who had ingested more saturated fats during the adolescent stagethey had lost the ability to discriminate between the known object and the new one, which did not happen in adult individuals.
This alteration of behavior was accompanied bychanges in the neuronal structure that affected, above all, the hippocampus, an area of the brain related to memory. It was also observed that in this part of the brain there was a partial loss of the effect of laleptine.
"All this may be due to the fact that the brain is more susceptible to saturated fats during adolescence, and they speculate with the possibility that this type of diet generateshormonal changes that affect the maturation of some areas of the brain", the experts assured.
