Patriot Health Digest
Feeling mentally off? It could be a lack of good sleep, an approaching virus or hormones, but it could also be caused by what you eat. That’s because food has a large role in your brain health — when you eat the correct nutrients, you encourage better blood flow into your brain.
To help stop that spacey feeling, here are the top foods for concentration that can help improve your ability to stay focused.
1. Seeds
Seeds such as chia, sunflower, hemp and flax are all good ways to bring in healthy fats into your meals. And research shows that eating a diet with unhealthy, saturated fat harms concentration, according to a study released in 2020.
When people ate a saturated fat-filled meal their focus was bad compared to when they consumed a meal with high amounts of healthy fat.
2. Water
Mood can be affected by untreated dehydration more than you think, at least in most people. But in some vulnerable people — like kids and older people — even a slight dehydration can cause cognitive problems, according to research revealed in the ​Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism.
One of the best ways to keep hydrated is to drink lots of water. The average person should drink around 11.5 and 15.5 cups each day, says the Mayo Clinic.
3. Coffee
One cup of coffee can give you a boost when you need it. The caffeine inside coffee has an overwhelmingly good effect on concentration, according to research revealed in ​Practical Neurology​ in 2016.
Drink too much caffeine, however, and you can get the jitters, which might cause you to feel more distracted. Also, remember that caffeine is in chocolate, non-herbal teas, and of course energy drinks.
4. Berries
New research has investigated a combination of blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and strawberries for their affect on focus.
When a small group of young people consumed a smoothie that had all of these berries, their mental functioning (attention, flexible thinking, concentration) was improved over the next 6 hours, and they had better scores on cognitive tests for the whole day compared to the people who had a placebo, according to a study released in the journal ​Nutrients​ in 2019.
Author: Blake Ambrose
