Good Grades with Healthy Diets

There may be more links between our eating habits and our performance in school than we originally thought. As children, most of us had it drilled into our heads
at school that beginning the day with a balanced breakfast, and eating healthy throughout the day, was essential for excelling in our studies. Whether or not we believed it as children, it holds true even as we grow older, and go on to pursue higher education.

What Does the Data Say?

Studies have confirmed the link between healthy diets and better academic performance. Unfortunately, only about 5% of US college students adhere to the recommended servings of fruits and vegetables.

Throughout the years, researchers have studied children to research the link between dietary choices, physical fitness, and academic performance. The findings have been fairly conclusive: students who maintained healthier eating habits tended to perform better in just about every measurable way: from reading to mathematics, the fitter students outperformed the less fit ones.

What Foods Are Best?

For some of us, “healthy” is a subjective term – so how can we choose what foods to eat? The Food Guide Pyramid is a great tool, but knowing the “why” behind it will help to better inform our choices. Here are the highlights:

– Fish is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, which are essential for maintaining focus and mental clarity.

– Vegetables, particularly “cruciferous” vegetables such as broccoli and cabbage, aid in memory retention.

– Berries can help to reduce the toxins in your bloodstreams and improve blood flow to the brain.

– Whole grains, unlike the refined carbs in pasta and white bread, can provide long-lasting energy and support neurological functioning.

Manufactures really mean about their natural food

Like many shoppers, I find food labels oddly confusing. You can have words such as “artificial” and natural” in most circumstances, and the implications are pretty clear.
But once the words hit food labels, the meaning starts to get blurry. With the prevalence of food flavoring in our diets today, I often wonder what it means to consume natural versus artificial flavors. Is one type of flavoring necessarily better for you when you’re not eating the actual food anyways? While “artificial” generally sounds fake and bad, there are artificially-flavored products that taste more “real” than their naturally-flavored counterparts. In the world of food flavoring, what do manufacturers really mean by natural and artificial flavors?

But before you peg artificial food flavoring as worse than natural flavors, Emma Boast, Program Director of the Museum of Food and Drink who is currently preparing for the exhibition “Flavor: Making It and Faking It,” offered a different perspective. She noted, “Natural and artificial flavors can be made from exactly the same chemicals that come from edible and inedible sources.” For example, you can have a “natural” lemon flavor made from citral, which is a chemical found in lemon peel. You can also have an “artificial” lemon flavor made from citral, which is processed from petrochemicals. The only difference between these two chemicals is how they were synthesized. Your sensory experience of each will be exactly the same, because they are the same chemical. The most important thing to note, according to Boast, is that “natural” citral does not need to come from lemons; it can come from plants like lemongrass and lemon myrtle, which also contain citral. In short, the word “natural” does not necessarily mean a product is better for you, or more sustainable.

As for health implications, Boast noted, “we don’t have any evidence distinguishing the nutritional benefits of natural and artificial food flavoring at this point.” Although odds are much higher of finding artificial food flavoring in potato chips than in broccoli for instance, the sugar and starch-rich component of the snack can be more easily considered as the culprit of the negative dietary effect before the artificiality of the flavoring comes into play, according to Boast.