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Mashed Potatoes Directly Enhance Memory
Gryphon writes "According to research completed at the University of Toronto, "mashed potatoes and barley may indeed be food for thought". The effect is most noticeable for the elderly and those with bad memories, but in all subjects, memory was noticeably enhanced just 15 minutes after ingestion, with effects lasting for about an hour. Being a student with exams to write, I thought this was cool -- bring on the beer and fries? :) " If potato chips counted I'd be capable of remembering the stone age. As it stands, I can't remember most of college.
If you are eating potatoes now, I suggest reading the article before you indulge too much.
They had people fast for an evening, then fed them food, then realized that their memory got better. Is this news? Maybe the reason they did better is BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T SO HUNGRY!!!
The experiment shows that the people who drank the glucose suppliment drink showed the least improvement. And those who ate mashed potatoes and barley had the most improvement. Maybe that is because THE PEOPLE WHO MERELY HAD A DRINK WERE STILL HUNGRY!!!
The experiment is silly. The test didn't feed people any non-glucose foods, so the control section was invalid. The researches believed the glucose in the potatoes was the cause. Thus they predicted that the glucose drink would help the most. It didn't. The ones who ate barley and potatoes did the best. So it is obviously not the glucose. More likely, it was that they needed solid food.
Being a scientist in the medical industry, I inclined to offer up a bit of skepticism. I'm always concerned about research of this nature, because it is so hard to weed out all the variables in these experiments. For example were subjects getting better because they were eating potatoes and barley, or do people who eat potatoes and barley eat more nutritiously (which has been shown to maintain good mental health)? What other possible explanations are out there that could account for this when the numbers seem to imply such a thing. It isn't hard to do. Are potatoes the cause of the effect?
-- Moondog
Even with memory prices as high as they are, I can improve the performance of my systems with simple garden vegetables and tubers?
While potatoes are bulky and may not be a good option for my laptop (which doesn't have to do much heavy number-crunching anyhow), there is certainly some space in my main box that could be devoted to mashed potatoes.
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You laugh, but that was seriously my first thought when I read the headline. I think I've been hacking for too long.
Recently coffee got some positive light, and now my favorite spud is brain food.
Now if we can get pepperoni pizza designated an aphrodisiac, I'll be all set!
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I never forgot the time I ate a bug by mistake.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The full experiment was that they starved two groups of elderly people for 24 hours, and then gave one group mashed potatoes and barley, while only giving sugar water to the other group.
Naturally, I don't think this was a very conclusive analysis, because, obviously, you're going to think better when you've eaten-- and complex carbohydrates are always going to be more nutritious than a cup of sugar and some water.
On that same note, I believe the effects of food on thought was conducted years ago, on school children.
First off, I concur that the claim that potatos and barley help boost memory is misleading. This claim, as supported by the article, is true. However, it may be a subset of a larger category of statements: that any nutritious food will help your short term memory for events that occur after eating. This was briefly mentioned in the article (toward the end), but was not brought to light very much.
In general, this exposes the need to pay close attention to journalistic style, which is rather lacking in this article. The author should have mentioned the test, the results, and the conclusions as presented by the scientists. It should not have started with part of the conclusions (the sensationalist part of course), then portions of the test, and then the rest of the conclusion in small print.
Nevertheless, just so people understand, the experiment, as presented, was indeed well-crafted and tested the hypothesis that glucose would improve memory function very well. Given the results, the hypothesis was wrong and the experiment suggests another hypothesis that may be tested in another study. To critisize an experiment for having disproven a hypothesis is useless. The act of having shown that glucose, amoung these 20 people, has little or no affect on memory, is quite useful. It is a mark of a good researcher to note the possible expansion of this experiment.
It is also the mark of poor journalism for sensationalizing the story to the point that it got posted here and evoked a response from me.
-B
BTW, nice humor in other posts!
I don't know if it will be as simple as extracting an active component. As the article comments, the key might be nothing more than glucose. From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes sense: if you find something tasty (i.e., nutritive, at least in the pre-M&M epoch), your memory ought to work hard to encode where/how you found it. There's a similar mechanism by which giving subjects stimulants after a lecture increases their recall later on - evidently the brain receives the exciting/reinforcing jolt, and assumes that whatever just happened must have been important.
The researchers tried to rule this out by using barley, which has a low GI (a measure of how much/quickly blood sugar rises after consumption) in addition to mashed potatoes, which have a GI higher than pure sugar. However, they failed to account for nonchemical effects of food, based on expectation or taste stimulation. An example of this is the cephalic phase response, in which the smell or taste of sweet food can cause a rise in blood insulin, even when the esophagus is redirected so that no rise in blood sugar ever occurs (the same thing can happen with artificial sweeteners). This might account for the poor performance of the glucose drink. High-concentration sugar water tastes pretty horrible (that's what the other 80% of the ingredients in Coke are for), and if the body hasn't been trained to recognize things that taste like that as food, it will be delayed in its efforts to treat it that way.
If the active component is glucose, that still doesn't answer much. It could be that the brain just kicks itself into high gear temporarily, as I suggested above. This wouldn't do much for permanent memory improvement, as such effects tend to habituate if overused (the fact that the tests were done after a fast probably made it especially strong). A more intriguing possibility is that there's a reason only those with poor or degraded memories showed improvement, other than a ceiling effect (i.e., those with good memories were already as good as they could get).
Neurological glucose hypometabolism has been implicated in several forms of memory loss, including Alzheimer's. Low levels have even been detected in apparently normal individuals who are genetically at risk for Alzheimer's. If something is impairing the brain's access to sugar or erroneously forcing it into "starvation mode," a big hit of glucose might jolt it back up to normal levels. In that case, it might be beneficial to have subjects eat more, smaller meals to ensure a more constant level of blood sugar (or they could just mainline glucose before exams). One way to test this hypothesis would be to feed subjects isocaloric protein- or fat- based foods like meat and cheese; they create some (though lesser) insulin response, but provide nothing that the glucose-loving brain can use as fuel.
The other major thing carbohydrates (and the associated insulin boost) do is raise brain levels of tryptophan, the precursor to serotonin. Mmmmm, serotonin...
- Michael Cohn
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!