Memory and Food
One only has to scan through the pages of a daily newspaper and it is only a matter of how many pages you have to turn until you get the classic headline "too much x kills you" and occasionally "hey, who knew, drinking a glass of y per day actually reduces your chance of dying a slow and painful death by z%", where 'z' is usually a suspiciously high percentage leading you to think that some rather misleading mathematical calculation has been made to derive that figure.
There are often claims made about certain foods that they are 'brain food' or great for your memory. Particularly lauded in this area are fish oils, omega-3 and so forth - and no good nutritionist will let too many a paragraph go by without lauding them. And those stats can't lie, can they?
Well, they can certainly mislead. Let's say the incidence rate of a nasty memory related condition is 1 in 1,000. If you give 1,000 people a random diet and another 1,000 a diet that gives them more fish than you could find in a small-sized ocean, what happens? If 1 person in the trials group ends up with some memory condition but in the other group it is 2 of 1,000, is that a 200% improvement in those with the fish oils? Hmm... well what happens if it goes to 0%... is that an infinite improvement?
The big problem about proving anything to do with diet is the incredible complexity of the human body. Ruling out other factors is effectively impossible. This is why when you read the proper scientific literature, they will tend to include more caveats and tentative steps than an octopus in rollerskates.
What can we learn from this? That the only thing we can say with reasonable certainty is that we should eat a mixed, balanced diet with fresh food such as fresh fruit and vegetables - the old 'everything in moderation' motto, or numquam nimis for the Latin scholars, is probably the best policy. As for any individual food group, there is more or less suggestive evidence for some that it may have tangible benefits, but a clear link between memory improvement and a specific food is not something scientifically beyond doubt.
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