Chewing has long been considered beneficial for digestion and nutrient absorption. But what you chew can apparently have an incredible effect on your brain. A new study has shown that munching on hard foods like wood can boost memory and improve brain health in ways that can’t produce soft foods.
Survey resultspublished in Frontiers of Systems Neuroscience suggests that the act of chewing itself can have a direct impact on cognitive health. But chewing harder foods can actually contribute significantly to your cognitive health. Researchers say chewing wood stimulated the formation of glutathione, an important brain antioxidant, more effectively than chewing gum.
How biting affects the brain
a study Published in the International Journal of Medical Sciences, it pointed out that being able to chew properly is paramount to maintaining a healthy diet and maintaining cognitive function for older people. The chewing process has been found to be extremely important for peripheral sensory input into the hippocampus to maintain and promote cognitive function.
In fact, tooth loss is a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Biomed Research International It is said that biting activates several brain regions that are essential for cognitive processing, including the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.
Biting can affect brain activity and blood flow. The brain needs a constant supply of oxygen and nutrients to function properly, and blood flow promotes it.
Oxidative stress can damage brain cells, which can lead to cognitive decline with age.
The brain uses certain antioxidants to protect itself, one of which is glutathione. The researchers in this study aim to find out how chewing certain hardness material affects glutathione levels and memory and thinking skills.
How to carry out the research
The researchers involved 52 healthy university students from Korea and divided them into two groups. Others were asked to chew gum while being given a small wooden stick similar to a popsicle stick to chew.
Before and after the 5-minute chewing, the researchers used magnetic resonance spectroscopy (particularly megapress techniques) to measure glutathione levels in the anterior cingulate cortex. This is a brain area associated with thought and cognitive control. Participants controlled for chewing and chewing patterns on paraffin wax gum or wooden tongue oppressors. We also completed cognitive tests to assess memory, attention and other thinking skills before and after chewing sessions.
Researchers found that the wood-chewing group significantly increased glutathione levels. However, no significant changes in glutathione levels were observed in the group that chewed the gums after chewing.
Wood chewing gum also performed better on memory tasks compared to other groups. In the gum tuning group, no link was found between glutathione changes and memory performance.
It was concluded that chewing wood appears to increase brain antioxidant levels and improve certain aspects of memory, and these two changes also appeared to be connected.
“In summary, this study led to two major findings: First, the wood chewing group experienced brain stimulation experiences. [glutathione (GSH)] “Synthesis that leads to increased brain GSH levels,” the researchers concluded. “Secondly, correlation analysis showed that high GSH levels in the wood shaving group are associated with improved scores on cognitive measures. As there are currently no drugs or established practices to increase GSH levels in the brain, our findings suggest that chewing medium-hard materials serves as an effective practice to raise GSH levels in the brain. Based on these results, it is likely that consumption of harder foods could be more effective in enhancing brain antioxidant defenses through increased GSH levels.”
