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Food For Thought
Why “hacking your brain” is nonsense, whereas ensuring essential micro-nutrients are in your diet will yield significant cognitive improvements
Two decades ago I happened to be working with some of the world’s leading scientists who were studying the biochemical processes involved with ageing and with age-releated diseases. A by-product of those years was the realization that a great deal of valuable scientific information remains unused, sitting in academic journals and other papers yet entirely unknown by the medical community.
Along with some of those scientists, I later founded a health optimization company to leverage this knowledge and thereby help improve people’s baseline health. Sadly, that particular company died in the panic of the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Undeterred, a handful of years later I co-founded a cognitive nutrition company making food products containing a range of micro-nutrients that multiple studies had indicated were essential for adequate mental functioning.
The reason I stress the notion of multiple studies is that for at least the last thirty years there’s been a crisis in the scientific world. The pressure to churn out papers with positive results in order to secure the next grant and the grant after that has led to a shocking decline in the validity of scientific studies. Two decades ago the most prestigious scientific publications Nature and Science both ran stories on the lamentable fact at least 50% of their content was spurious. Sadly, that turned out to be an under-estimate. More recent studies indicate at least 90% of all published articles in reputable scientific journals have no validity. So when I went searching through the scientific literature to understand the state of cognitive nutrition I discarded all results that hadn’t been independently verified by other teams of researchers investigating the same compound for the same effects. Only in this way could I feel reasonably sure that any cited results were reliable.
After nearly two years of examining the literature, I had identified more than a dozen compounds for which there was strong evidence of cognitive benefit. Some micro-nutrients, like magnesium, had been shown to improve long-term memory function. Others, like some of…
