Brain Boosting Foods: From Green Leafy Vegetables to Berries, Nuts and More

Regularly incorporating brain healthy foods into your diet can improve your mental functioning, and these foods can also protect your heart—thanks to their omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants, B vitamins, and more.

A health publication by Harvard lists five types of brain boosting foods:

• Green leafy vegetables: We’ll get to these soon in this post!
• Fatty fish: These includes salmon, canned light tuna, cod, and pollack, with these fish containing plenty of healthy unsaturated fats. These unsaturated fats can help to lower proteins that can cause problems with people with Alzheimer’s disease.
• Berries: Eating strawberries and blueberries weekly can help to slow down memory decline, with research showing how the flavonoids they contain can help to improve a person’s memory.
• Tea and coffee: Caffeine contained in these beverages may help to solidify new memories, with a study showing that people who take in more caffeine can score more highly on mental functioning tests.
• Walnuts: These nuts are high in a certain type of omega-3 fatty acid that can protect arteries, which is helpful to the brain—and also lower blood pressure, helpful to the heart. Higher walnut consumption has also been connected to higher scores on cognitive tests.

Green Leafy Vegetables and Brain Health

Health-related studies often focus on significant health challenges—which makes sense. After all, when prioritizing resources in studies, it can be logical to prioritize them by focusing on serious issues. When it comes to brain health, studies often focus on what can be done to slow down cognitive decline.

In 2018, a study published in Neurology and on the National Institute on Aging (NIA) website noted that eating one serving of greens daily has been linked with slowing down that type of decline.

Specific brain healthy foods mentioned include spinach, kale, collards, and lettuce. The researchers expect that, in future studies, they’ll also find evidence that eating that daily servings of green leafy vegetables will play a role in maintaining brain health.

These results echo what was announced at the 2017 Alzheimer’s Association’s International Conference: that eating green leafy vegetables, along with berries, whole grains, fish, and beans could reduce “future cognitive impairment by up to 35 percent.”

AARP also reports on a study by Rush University that specifically looks at leafy greens, calling them “one of the most nutritious of any foods” and saying that they are a “key component of preventing mental decline.”

The chief science officer of the Alzheimer’s Association, Maria Carrillo, told AARP—when talking about regular consumption of leafy greens—that “Even little changes can have a significant impact.”

Our Greens Recipes

This Chef’s Garden Salad is a delicious, easy to prepare way to enjoy eating farm-fresh greens. Our Lettuce Wraps recipe is also super simple—and very versatile. Get creative! And here’s another salad recipe, this one also incorporating delicious and nutritious root vegetables.

Get Your Green Leafy Vegetables

At Farmer Jones Farm at The Chef's Garden, we make it easy to enjoy the best of the farm’s fresh leafy greens. You just need to order our Leafy Greens Box!

This box could include lettuce, spinach, and mixed greens. Using our delicious and nutritious greens, you can create a salad that’s appreciated every bit as much as the entrée, thanks to our incredible assortment of flavors and textures. All of our products are regeneratively farmed, harvested fresh, and shipped directly to you. This box contains vegetables for two for approximately one week. T