Summer School | What To Eat for Brain Health

Welcome back to Summer School. I'm Colleen Sloan, a PA and dietitian, and for this special series of the Exam Room Nutrition Podcast, I'm bringing back a few of my favorite conversations from the archives. Today's lesson is all about feeding the brain. I'm joined by Dr. Jenna Steadman, a cognitive performance dietitian, to talk about how nutrition can support focus, energy, memory, and long-term cognitive health. We'll cover the nutrients with the strongest evidence for brain health, whether blending fruit really changes its nutrition, and Jenna's simple brain power plate for building meals without tracking or complicated math. So grab your coffee, take your seat, and welcome to class. Well, hey, Dr. Stedman, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast today. I can't wait for this topic. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

This is wonderful.

Before we even get into the meat of this discussion, can you please explain exactly what is cognitive health?

Absolutely. So this is definitely a word or a phrase that has gotten many definitions, right? Many uses throughout the years. Cognitive health really is just our ability to think well, think clearly. We can use it though in a lot of different ways. But sometimes when we talk about cognitive health, we think really only about our elderly population and their cognition declining, right? That happens with age. The cognitive health that I usually refer to is our immediate cognitive performance. So how well are we able to articulate our thoughts? How well can we recall memory decision making? And so cognition really can be either immediate or long-term health.

I love how you mentioned that we normally think about it with like the older population because that is exactly where my mind goes, right? I'm in the other side, I'm in pediatrics. When I hear cognitive health, I immediately think of like cognitive decline and that comes with aging. But I love that you focus on like the here and now and your ability to grab memories and how acute your thinking is. So, how exactly does nutrition influence our cognitive function?

In all stages of our life, nutrition has an immediate and longer term impact on our cognitive function. So if we look at our pediatrics and our adolescents, this is a very critical time for nutrition to actually help with the growth and development, placing all of these neural pathways, things like that, supporting that brain growth, you know, through our kind of middle age, a lot of us end up being, this is where we are really tapping into that foundation that we laid down in childhood. And then, of course, as we just talked about, as we age, we're trying to prevent that decline as as much as we can. So the foods that we're eating can have that immediate effect, right? If you feel like you're getting what we call like a little bit of brain fog, oftentimes that really is just low blood sugar. And so if we get some of those good carbohydrates in, we can feel an immediate, almost immediate brain boost, right? This is why I always tell people like if you're in school, any of my students eating before test, hugely important. Way more important than a cup of coffee. Get a donut. I don't care what it is, get some carbohydrates before you take a test. Your brain needs it. But then also looking at, you know, how well our nutrition pattern, looking at a longer period of time, three, four, six months even at a time, are we including things like our daily omega-3s? Are we getting enough protein? Are we choosing more fiber-rich foods than low fiber foods? So all of these things can have a huge effect on brain function. And also most importantly, we always tend to forget about hydration, right? A well-hydrated brain is gonna be a very happy brain. And that's something that we often forget too.

Yeah, really good point. So I stocked your website and I love your brain power plate. So I would love for you to kind of teach us, our listeners, what the components are of that plate, how it supports cognitive health, because I think this could be a great teaching tool for our listeners.

Well, there are a lot of different plate models out there. So absolutely use whichever one works best in your practice. I really haven't seen a bad plate out there. So, you know, there's the Harvard one, the Stanford one, like there's a lot of great ones out there, and they really all support good overall health. I really love my brain power plate because it establishes a pretty good foundation for getting all of our food groups in and it focuses on food groups themselves rather than macronutrients. I think we got into, I don't want to say a phase because that's rude. We got really interested in counting calories, counting macros, like tracking all of our foods. And I really don't think anyone actually enjoys doing that. And that isn't necessarily teaching us, or your patients at least, the specifics of how to create a long-term sustainable nutrition pattern, right? If we're obsessing about each little like calorie that goes in and out of our body, that's that's not good health. That's not that's not always nutrition. So the brain power plate itself teaches food groups, just like the my plate example does. So we have, you know, the plate itself. It is divided in, you know, about thirds-ish. Those portions at least can be adjusted based on energy usage throughout the day. So we have lean proteins is one of the groups, starches that can be high or low fiber, which we'll can talk about a little bit when those are necessary. And then produce, fruits and or vegetables. And for the most part, I don't actually really care which. Typically, with most of the patients that I've worked with, fruits tend to pair very well with breakfast foods, and vegetables tend to pair very well with lunches and dinners. But I'm certainly not judging anyone. If you want to have chicken and strawberries for dinner, you can certainly do that. That's absolutely fine. So the idea is that if we're hitting all of those food groups in a meal, most of the time, we are probably getting most of the nutrients there. The added bonus to this is our healthy fats. Usually I don't have to coach anyone on healthy fats. I think that's been kind of drilled into our head enough. Everyone pretty much knows what we're choosing there. So if it's, you know, the salad dressing on top or cooking with olive oil or adding avocado, or maybe the protein like fish or something like that has healthy fats in it. For the most part, at least what I've seen in my practice, and this may be different for others, we don't have too much of an issue getting healthy fats in. However, the other food groups, we tend to usually miss one. So oftentimes I'll see people, maybe they'll make a salad and they'll put chicken on top of it, but they're missing their whole grain, right? There's no, not a lot of starches in there, but they're getting their produce and protein. So the idea is that if we can get all those kind of those big three in most meals, then we're on the right track. The other nice thing that I like about the plate model that I've made is that you can take almost any meal, I think, and apply this model to it, right? So even pizza night. A lot of times people see this and they're like, well, I don't want to have, you know, chicken, rice, and broccoli every day for the rest of my life. You don't have to do that. That is a great meal, right? That's a good example there. But let's take pizza night, right? The pizza crust is our starch, might not be whole grain or whole wheat, but it is your starch that night. Hopefully there's some kind of protein. Usually we have some kind of protein on our pizza. And then either we're adding vegetables to that pizza or we are having a side salad or roasted vegetables, something with it. But you can, rather than eating a whole cheese pizza by yourself, you can have a couple pieces of pizza and some vegetables and make that a more balanced meal than it would originally. So not every meal is gonna be our perfect ideal meal. But if we use this model most of the time, we're getting most of the nutrients, and that's really what we're aiming for.

I do love that nutrition education is moving away from carb counting and macronutrient counting and tracking because although I'm type A, like I I hate tracking stuff. I haven't tracked stuff since I was probably in college and I learned how to do it because it's just such a headache. And really the accuracy, it's not there. So I love the plate methods. Like you said, there's a few, but I just think it's so much easier. It's intuitive for patients as well. And so when we're talking with patients, can you kind of break down those main food groups and give maybe a few examples that the clinician would say, okay, in the protein section, you have this, and their start section have this, and maybe explain the differences that would be in each.

Absolutely. And if anyone wants to go grab this resource, it is something that is on my recipe blog on the website. So it does give some more examples for you. So our protein section, if we're thinking about grain healthy foods, we want to choose our leaner protein options. So fish is a great example. That's a really nice one to add in there. Beans and soy products like soybeans, tenpe, tofu, things like that. Those are all good options too. Our leaner proteins tend to be things like our white meat, like chicken and poultry. Those are great proteins. And then some others fall into that. Like you can have egg whites and I already said beans, things like that. So there's a lot of good variety in protein that we can get. I think Americans sometimes fall into like just eating chicken every single day. And I really hope that we can get a little bit more variety than that as best we can. Our starches is a really fun one because there are so many that can fit into this besides rice. Rice is excellent. I'm not demonizing anything. You can absolutely, that's fabulous. But a lot of foods can fit in here, right? Bread is healthy, bagels are healthy, and then you can get into other grains like quinoa and amaranth and like things like that that all fit in there. Pastas are a great option for a lot of people. You can even sometimes like I try to recommend like the whole wheat or the whole grain pastas as much as possible. If you have some picky eaters in your household, which I know some people do, mixing and doing like half whole wheat and half regular pasta, mixing them together is sometimes nice. We can also get things like, you know, tortillas and and other, you know, grains in there. So our starches kind of section to potatoes. I always forget to talk about potatoes. Those are healthy. I know a lot of people come to me and they're like, I can't eat pasta and potatoes anymore. You can. They're they're definitely a good starch. They got a lot of good nutrients in there. And you can kind of rotate different ones out either seasonally or however works best for your family. And then the produce section is the easy one, right? All fruits and vegetables fit into that section. And sometimes I do get that question is is there a healthier fruit or a healthier vegetable? And there really isn't. They're they're all good options. So if, you know, you don't like one of them, that is absolutely okay. If you hate cooked spinach, you do not have to eat cooked spinach. You can have raw spinach, you can have all the other greens, you can have other vegetables. That's completely fine. So all fruits and vegetables fit into that category and you can try them all and find the ones that you like.

All right. Now I have a question that I feel as though a patient might ask. So, where would the kind of trendier pastas fit that are made with like chickpea pasta or lentils?

So we could, if we wanted to, kind of double count those a little bit, right? Because if you read the box, a lot of these will have like 15 or 20 grams of fiber and protein, right? Because they're usually made from beans. So if you wanted to, you could have just a bowl of these, you know, like bean pastas and count you're getting protein, you're getting fiber, and then, you know, mix in vegetables and red sauce or pesto or whatever you're doing, and then get your produce in there. Absolutely.

Awesome. Like a two for one nutrient. I love it. Okay. I love that brain health plate. It's so simple. It's fantastic. Now, I love to get into even deeper, like the specific nutrients that are shown to support cognitive function and how our patients would make sure that they're eating enough of those foods.

What I've at least seen, both in practice and you know, the research that we have published now, there's kind of a big three that really have stood out and that we have very good evidence for. The first one I think most practitioners will know is our omega-3 fatty acids. And this is one that you don't want to just like have once in a while, right? Like you have a test this day or a presentation or a tournament, right? Something like that. So today's the day I'm going to eat my omega-3s. This is one you want to have a good foundation of. So I always recommend try to remind your patients of things that already have omega-3s in them that they would be able to eat on a fairly consistent basis. So, like things like fish, it really still is recommended that we get, you know, two to three servings of fish throughout the week. For some people, that might actually be a main protein source. They might be having fish every day, which is wonderful. And then other things that are a little bit easier, like nuts and seeds, have great omega-3s. And so, like, I always tell people like, get a handful of trail mix is like your afternoon snack or something like that. Anytime we can sneak in more and more of these omega-3s is great for kind of laying that good foundation for that nutrient. So as soon as we can make that kind of a normal practice to have these every day, that's going to be really beneficial. The second one, which we kind of we hear about, but I don't think always gets the right kind of recognition, is our antioxidant-rich foods. These traditionally we know as our fruits and vegetables, mostly things like berries, dark leafy greens. Anytime we can get these in in higher quantities is going to be more helpful. So I always tell people, like, we got to bring back the smoothie. Like that's really popular for a while. And I feel like, you know, people did it. It was their New Year's resolution in like, you know, 2016 or something. And we got to bring those back because that's a really easy way to just, you know, drink your spinach and berries and banana or whatever it is in the morning and kind of check all of those boxes and get those daily antioxidants. The other one that I think doesn't always get enough credit is dark chocolate, is a really great one. Those cacao beans actually have wonderful antioxidants in them. So tell your patients that they should be eating dark chocolate every single day. So this is one that I love to tell people as a dietitian is like absolutely, if you have a sweet tooth, dark chocolate, even just like you can get like, you know, the little bites of them or even just like chocolate chips sometimes, getting those and you know, having a little bit every day after dinner or something like that. It's a nice treat to kind of reward yourself, but also do something good for your health. So sometimes people think, you know, on a health kick, I'm gonna, you know, be changing everything in my diet. I can't have all of these things anymore. Hopefully we're changing that mindset a little bit. But dark chocolate is one that everyone can eat every single day or should eat every single day, I would like to say. Other ones that we have good evidence for is things like B vitamins, iron, zinc, things like that. And these are really phenomenal for brain development and also protecting, you know, our existing, you know, pathways and neurons and things like that. So eggs, whole grains, spinach, our leaner meats, beans have a lot of these nutrients. I feel like everyone kind of forgets about beans. These are really good foods that that contain a lot of these very specific nutrients for us.

Okay, you also mentioned smoothies. And I want to pause here for a little bit because I agree with you. I am teen smoothie. I love me a good spinach, blueberry, Greek yogurt smoothie. It is so delicious. But there are some influencers on social media who are hating on smoothies and have made people be super afraid to blend their fruit. So can you talk to that? Does blending completely abolish all nutrients in the fruit that we're eating?

No, absolutely not. And we actually do have, I think there are maybe two or three studies that I've come across, but I've heard of a few others that have actually tested this, right? Because we get the same hate from like canned foods and vegetables or jar anything like that. They're like, well, don't buy this, the nutrients are gone, or frozen fruits and vegetables, don't buy this, nutrients are gone. Absolutely not true. They all of these things are are picked at peak ripeness and either canned or frozen or however. So these are all very good choices. As to smoothies, smoothies are actually going to be a better choice than our favorite juice cleanses that I see circling around every January 1st. Because when we're blending things in, you're not actually, you're it's almost like this is gross, but it's almost like just chewing your food, right? The that's all the blender is doing is just grinding it up. So if it's grinding it to a point where you can drink it, it's just it's the same as chewing, which I don't know if everyone wants to think of it that way, but that's all it is. When we put whole foods into a blender, the fiber is retained. And that high fiber that we're choosing rather than the juice is helping actually stabilize our blood sugar. So for a lot of our influencer friends out there saying that, you know, it's spiking blood sugar, the nutrients are gone doing all these things. It's not. We have studies to prove it. Dieticians who have been in school for a million years can attest to this. These are still gonna be a very healthy option for you. And if we're truly concerned with like the fiber integrity, like have a piece of a whole wheat toast with it, have some oatmeal with it. Oh no, everyone hates oatmeal too naturally.

Yes, be careful.

You're gonna get hate. That's really too bad. Oatmeals are another really good one. Let me debunk that right now. Getting whole grains, there's good B vitamins, and like everyone should be eating oatmeal every day. That's a good one.

Yeah, totally agree with you. Thank you for clearing that up because every time I see that reel pop up on my feed, I just am like, I want to throw my phone against the wall because it's so irritating. How many people are now believing it and are afraid to eat smoothies? Smoothies are so easy to prep too. It literally takes you like three to five minutes, and then you've got like an on-the-go breakfast. So thank you for giving us that expertise answer. All right. So, again, when I was stalking your blog page, I came across the post titled Nine Questions for Your Doctor about Cognitive Health. So I actually want to flip this. And if you could go over maybe a few of those questions and like give us the answers so we can cheat off of you so we can actually respond if our patients come to us with any of these questions.

Absolutely. And I'll pick through because I just pulled it up too. There, there were two or three that were really my favorites here. So the number eight and nine. Number eight was can cognition decline be prevented or managed? And I see this a lot with supplements on the internet, right? They they claim that, you know, you know, you can prevent cognition decline and all of these things. I can promise you there's no supplement in the world that's been approved for such claims. So that we can debunk right away if any patients are asking about that. In terms of preventing cognitive decline or even managing it right once we start to see some of those signs, it is possible. And nutrition is a piece to it, but it's not the only thing we can do, right? We can do daily physical activity, even just walking. Like it doesn't, you don't have to be a marathon runner, but you know, more movement throughout the day, anything that challenges our brain, doing puzzles, crossword puzzles, you know, learning other languages, things like that. Anytime we can be using our brain, feeding it the best nutrients, using movement throughout the day, improving cardiovascular, our brain is a highly vascular organ. So anytime we're doing any kind of movement, that's great for it. It takes very intentional way of living to do that. And it's, but it is very possible. So if you have any patients that are asking, you know, what do I do? There are some absolutely very real and very practical changes that you can make, nutrition included, that can do that. But there's no supplement out there. So be wary of those. If people come to you with supplements and say, I want to take this hundred dollar pill, don't let them fall for that. So that's one to be cautious of. And then my second favorite one was number nine. How can I create a comprehensive cognitive health plan? And this is where the interdisciplinary team comes together. So if you get, you know, your dietitian and your PD, you get kind of everyone together, we can get a nutrition plan. And then, you know, getting, getting more physically active, improving sleep, things like this, you know, we get everyone together and we can make a comprehensive plan like this. That that's exactly what I do. So it's absolutely possible we can get the right people connected and people can live a very long, healthy life with good brain health.

Now, if you guys want to read the rest of those nine questions your patient might be asking, I'm gonna go ahead and link to that blog post in the show notes below so you can check it out and read for yourself the rest of them. Okay, Dr. Steadman, you also share a lot of great recipes on your page. So can you just give us maybe three simple ideas, nothing too fancy, but something that we might be able to tell a patient at the end of the visit who's like, oh, well, you know, give me some ideas of what foods that I can eat for those patients who do want to start eating more brain-boosting foods.

So I'll start with fish, because that's kind of our most well known recommendation. So ideally, two to three servings of fish throughout the week. And this can be, you know, cheap can of tuna fish, or it can be something fancy or you can treat yourself to salmon, whatever you would like, two to three times a week, ideally. But you want to go higher than that, absolutely, you can. You can certainly do more than that. Really interestingly, we have uh a couple new studies showing that the mercury in fish that we've been very cautious of for a long time, while we still want to kind of keep half an eye on it, it is not actually doing a detriment to our health as much as we thought that it did. So it's still something to be aware of, right? You don't want to probably eat a high mercury fish breakfast, lunch, and dinner the rest of your life, but certainly enjoy, enjoy fish. You could eat it daily if you wanted to. That's perfectly healthy. Nuts and seeds are usually, you can usually get cheaper ones, which is a nice option. Those are a great snack, which I do recommend people do some better snacking. I know that was something that was going around our influencers, just getting things wrong for a while. They were very afraid of snacking, right? You didn't want to, you know, eat too much or spike your blood sure when, you know, whatever they're talking about. Inflammation, they all talk about inflammation a lot. Having a snack in between meals, especially as we get to that point at the end of the day where it's like two, three, four o'clock. A lot of us are ending our work day. We're in between lunch and dinner. That might even sometimes for a lot of us be our pre-workout snack. You should absolutely be eating before you work out. So having something like nuts and seeds, that's a really easy one to kind of sneak in there. I always like to recommend chocolate every day. That's my favorite recommendation, but I should probably say things like berries. Berries are a really, really good one. And buying, you know, the big bag of frozen berries once a week and just kind of going through that. You can either, you know, throw those into a smoothie or into whatever, you know, you're cooking throughout the week. Or, you know, I've I've had plenty of, you know, clients, patients who will, you know, let them kind of defrost a little bit. And maybe it's not the the crunchy, fresh berry, but it is, it is berries and it's cheaper and you can get them usually year-round.

Well, and I could see patients maybe spreading it on a piece of whole grain cracker or toast as like a jam, so to speak, without the added sugars. So yeah, that's a great idea. This has been such a fun and uh just incredible conversation. So if people want to learn more about you, what you do with patients, and just connect with you, where can we direct them to?

So the two best places to connect with me is through my website, masternutritionlab.com. You can find the lab for free. It's this huge free platform that I built that any patient or provider can go through and you can test out all of these different nutrition strategies. I set up kind of like a nine-step program, but you can really kind of pick through however you would like. The other second best place to connect with me is on LinkedIn, because that's the only one that I actually check regularly. You can find me on Instagram, but I'm not very good at posting stuff. So just my name, Jenna Steadman at LinkedIn.

And that's where we connected. So come hang with us on LinkedIn. You guys can find me at Exam Room Nutrition on LinkedIn or Instagram. Dr. Stedman, thank you so much for being with us. I'm just so grateful for the gift of your time. Thanks again for being here.

Thank you. This is great.

All right, my friend. Well, if you want to keep the learning going, go listen to episode 150 titled How to Reduce Dementia Risk with Daily Habits. I think you'll love listening to this episode next. In it, I chatted with a brain health expert and he gave some of the most unique and practical tips I had ever heard of. I'll link to it down in the show notes. Well, I hope you are having a fantastic summer, and I will see you next week for another episode of Summer School.