Brain Power

the benefits of fasting is that eating less gives our metabolism a break, affording our body respite from this process.

a healthy brain is about feeling good

One of those is to get enough sleep.

• If you have access to a weekly fruit-and-veg-box delivery, it can be a fun way to increase the diversity of the food you normally eat.

• Sprinkle mixed nuts and seeds on top of cereal, yogurt or soup – each variety counts towards your weekly thirty.

• The same goes for mixed salad leaves – an easy way to diversify your diet with minimal effort.

• Freeze excess fruit and vegetables to retain most of the nutrients, and pop them into smoothies or other dishes

• Eat mainly plants and try to get in at least thirty different varieties of plant-based foods a week. This includes fruit and vegetables, pulses, nuts and seeds. Fibre, especially wholegrain, is particularly good.

• Avoid too much refined and heavily processed food, and sugary food and drinks.

• Herbs and spices are an easy way to add variety to your diet, and pack it full of flavour too.

the most important thing is to eat a diverse range of plant-based foods, in order to nurture a diverse microbiome.

giving women a probiotic yogurt containing bacteria twice a day for four weeks improved the way their brains processed emotions.

Short-chain fatty acids are also anti-inflammatory and can influence the immune system in other ways too.

Neurotransmitters and short-chain fatty acids, produced when gut microbes chew up fibre from our diet that we can’t digest ourselves, can both fire up the vagus nerve, sending signals to the brain.

Remarkably, our gut microbes can also produce neurotransmitters, the chemicals our brain cells use to communicate, including serotonin (a lack of which is implicated in depression), noradrenaline (which primes the body for action) and dopamine (which plays a vital role in mood, and in our ability to learn and plan).