Blueberry Boosts Brain Activity

We have just found out why the Americans are so smart: because of the blueberry!...

Just a sole dietary switch on the lab animals with a genetic pattern rendering them prone towards Alzheimer's disease enabled them to act as well as healthy counterparts in maze tests.

The team at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research agency, found the diet-induced behavioral differences in the Alzheimer's-prone animals after administering them blueberry extracts from what would be their early adulthood to early middle age. The research was led by James Joseph, chief of the Neuroscience Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston, Mass.

The impaired mice carried a mutation boosting the brain levels of amyloid beta. This protein (or fragments of it) builds up the neuritic plaque, which induces "hardening of the brain" in Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of age related dementia.

The research started with four months old rats, the equivalent of early adulthood in humans. 50 % of the mutant group was fed on a diet including blueberry extract for eight months. The other 50 % were fed on a standard rat chow, while control groups of healthy rodents were fed on the two diets, too.

When the rodents were 12 months old, meaning early middle-age in humans, all groups were checked for their score in a maze. The mutant mice fed with the blueberry diet scored equally well as healthy control mice did, much better than mutant individuals fed on standard chow.

The team discovered higher activity of a type of enzymes, named kinases, in the brains of the mutant mice fed on the blueberry extract. Two of these enzymes, ERK and PKC, are known as crucial in cognitive function, like conversion of short-term to long-term memory.