Exploring the connection between specific dietary practices and cognitive function

Abstract

The gut-brain axis for various cognitive functions has become a subject of research in recent years. Although a lot of metabolic pathways have been revealed that are activated from the gut and impact different functions and parts of the brain, we believe that the direct impact of dietary practices, which essentially shape the gut microbiome on specific cognitive functions, remains under-explored. In this study, we employ a survey and experimental approach to study the difference in people’s performance in short-term memory-based and cognitive interference-based tasks with respect to their diet type, consumption of specific ingredients, and their dietary experiences like cravings. We found that diet type (meat-based or not) and the intake of foods like dark chocolate and caffeine significantly impacted their performance in the Short-Term Memory Task and Stroop Task. Studies that have shown the impact of such products in such tasks have included immediate effects of them by analysing performance differences in subjects before and after its consumption, while we aim to present the long term impact of regular intakes and daily incorporation of these substances on cognitive function. To further validate our findings, we show that the inheritance of the gut microbiome from mothers to their children, which has been well-established so far, causes a few cognitive properties of the mothers too to be significantly associated with their children. We show that out of a few species reported to be responsible for psychological stress in mothers and their children, the relative abundance of two particular species in the mothers’ gut are significant predictors of their child’s stress condition. We also present an application for infants’ psychological stress state prediction just using the relative abundance of these species in the mothers’ gut.