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 UCLA
Newsroom:
Scientists learn how food affects brain
By Stuart Wolpert | 7/9/2008 [Full
Text]
In addition to helping protect us from heart disease and cancer, a balanced diet and regular exercise can also protect the brain and ward off mental disorders.
"Food is like a pharmaceutical compound that affects the brain," said Fernando Gómez-Pinilla, a UCLA professor of neurosurgery and physiological science who has spent years studying the effects of food, exercise and sleep on the brain. "Diet, exercise and sleep have the potential to alter our brain health and mental function. This raises the exciting possibility that changes in diet are a viable strategy for enhancing cognitive abilities, protecting the brain from damage and counteracting the effects of aging."
Gómez-Pinilla analyzed more than 160 studies about food's affect on the brain; the results of his analysis appear in the July issue of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience and are available online at
Nature.
>>
Full Text
Economist.com: 
Cognition nutrition: Food for thought
Jul 17th 2008, From The
Economist print edition
[Full
Text]
CHILDREN have a lot to contend with these days,
not least a tendency for their pushy parents to force-feed them omega-3
oils at every opportunity. These are supposed to make children brainier,
so they are being added to everything from bread, milk and pasta to baby
formula and vitamin tablets. But omega-3 is just the tip of the
nutritional iceberg; many nutrients have proven cognitive effects, and
do so throughout a person’s life, not merely when he is a child.
Fernando Gómez-Pinilla, a fish-loving professor of
neurosurgery and physiological science at the University of California,
Los Angeles, believes that appropriate changes to a person’s diet can
enhance his cognitive abilities, protect his brain from damage and
counteract the effects of ageing. Dr Gómez-Pinilla has been studying
the effects of food on the brain for years, and has now completed a
review, just published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, that has
analysed more than 160 studies of food’s effect on the brain. Some
foods, he concludes, are like pharmaceutical compounds; their effects
are so profound that the mental health of entire countries may be linked
to them. >>
Full Text
Newsweek: 
Health for Life: Can Exercise Make You Smarter?
By Mary Carmichael, Newsweek online,
April 9, 2007
... With regular exercise, the body builds
up its levels of BDNF, and the brain's nerve cells start to branch out,
join together and communicate with each other in new ways. This is the
process that underlies learning: every change in the junctions between
brain cells signifies a new fact or skill that's been picked up and stowed
away for future use. BDNF makes that process possible. Brains with more of
it have a greater capacity for knowledge. On the other hand, says UCLA
neuroscientist Fernando Gómez-Pinilla, a brain that's low on BDNF
shuts itself off to new information. In his experiments, ... >>
Full Text
Los Angeles Times:
Health : Nutrition: Remember this: Benefits of ginkgo
are minor
By Chris Woolston, Los
Angeles Times Jun 18, 2007
... Ginkgo may be the most scrutinized
supplement to ever hit health store shelves. There have been hundreds of
ginkgo studies, including many classic rats-in-a-maze-type investigations
and dozens of human trials. According to Fernando
Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at UCLA and a
spokesperson for the Society for Neuroscience, the bulk of these studies
point in the same direction: Ginkgo probably can help improve
thinking, but not by much. "It won't make you a genius," he
says. ... >>
Full Text
Science News online:
Exercising the body can benefit the mind
Science News online, Feb 25, 2006
... These articles usually described what
doctors had witnessed in their own practices, says neurobiologist
Fernando Gómez-Pinilla of the University of California, Los Angeles.
"This clinical literature described that exercise could be good for
many different things," he says. ... >>
Full Text
Science News online:
Foods may affect the brain as well as the body
Science News online, Mar 4, 2006
... Neurosurgery
professor Fernando Gómez-Pinilla operates a traumatic brain-injury
center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Because his
past studies suggested that exercise affects how well brains function (SN:
2/25/06, p. 122), he wondered whether diet might also change how his
patients coped with brain injuries. ... >>
Full Text
 New Book:
Synaptic
Plasticity: Basic Mechanisms to Clinical Applications (Neurological
Disease and Therapy)
>> Full Text
Contributors from
Our Lab:
Prof. Fernando Gómez-Pinilla
Dr. Shoshanna
Vaynman
Daily Bruin:
The curry
cure
Daily Bruin, UCLA, Published online: 14
January 2005
... it was found that curcumin
can protect the brain after traumatic brain injury. Researchers placed
rats on a curcumin-based diet for three weeks prior to a concussion injury
similar to that which one might experience in a car accident. "Part of the
effect of the injury is that the animals lose some capacity for learning
and memory," said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, professor in the department of
neurosurgery and physiological sciences. "When the animals are maintained
on the curcumin diet, the brains of the animals are protected," he added.
... More
Nature:
Exercise may speed spinal cord
repair
Nature, Published online:
10 November 2003
...Like some humans, a proportion of
rats with partially severed spinal cords can learn to walk again. Given a
wheel to run in, their recovery time halves to just one month, Fernando
Gómez-Pinilla from the University of California, Los Angeles told this
week's Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in New Orleans. Rats take
to the exercise naturally and run up to 4 kilometres a night. ... More
Brain Waves:
Exercise & the Brain
Brain Waves, Society For Neuroscience, 2002
Spring
...A key mediator of exercise's effect on learning and
memory is brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is a protein
known to have a critical role in the repair and maintenance of neural
circuits. Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, PhD, and his colleagues at the
University of California in Los Angeles, found that voluntary exercise
increased levels of BDNF in the hippocampus, a brain area involved with
learning and memory. ... More
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