Nutrition and Cognition

1473 Words3 Pages

It is a simple fact that what we eat affects who we are. Most people know that what is put into our bodies on a daily basis will always come back to bite us, or reward us. However, many people mindlessly fill their bodies with unhealthy foods, and question later why they are feeling the way they are. Some search themselves for why they are feeling so bad, but overlook the fact that the cause may be in the bag of Doritos next to them. Nutrition plays an integral role in our lives and directly manifests itself through day to day cognition, general quality of life, and even life long cognitive development.
The development of the mind is a constant process. It is the ongoing and ever-transforming source of all human knowledge. Everyone grows and learns differently, therefore, it is very hard to find, or even collect, accurate data corresponding to mental health and development on a large scale. However, the easiest place to find information like this is in schools. Students are subject to constant monitoring, and objective assessment on a daily basis, and elementary students in particular offer treasure troves of developmental data that we can use to make inferences regarding a number of independent variables, one of the them being their intake of food throughout a normal school day.
In a child's first years of life, it is important for optimal growth that they receive improved nutrition and improved learning opportunities. Not only are those two factors independently crucial to early development, but it has been said that they have a direct correlation. Among a plethora of results gathered from a study done in 2011 by Kate Northstone et al are “novel associations between dietary patterns in early childhood, and current diet, with ...

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