Brain Boosting Spices

I’ve talked about the best fruits, nuts, and vegetables to improve cognitive function. Are there any brain-boosting spices? Garlic compounds and extracts have been shown to ameliorate age-related cognitive dysfunction or reduce Alzheimer’s neuropathology in rodents. To test garlic in people, young, healthy volunteers were randomized to five weeks of twice-a-day capsules containing just an eighth of a teaspoon of straight garlic powder, like you would find at any grocery store. Compared to placebo capsules matched for color, texture, size, shape, and even smell, those getting the pinches worth of garlic powder experienced significantly improved memory and attention.

The researchers concluded that adding garlic to food “might slow the onset and/or progression neurodegenerative diseases,” but just because something boosts cognition in young healthy adults doesn’t necessarily mean it will help them later on. Indeed, in a large-scale nationwide study of thousands of men and women over the age of 80 in China, no significant link between garlic consumption and cognition was observed over time.

Fresh and dried ginger compounds do appear able to cross the blood-brain barrier, but what evidence do we have that ginger helps? Like with the garlic, ginger and ginger compounds have been found to be able to prevent and treat memory deficits in animal models, but I could only find one published randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of ginger in people. Middle-aged women randomized to daily ginger extracts for two months exhibited enhanced cognitive function compared to those who ended up in the placebo group. The researchers concluded that ginger was a “potential brain tonic,” but they didn’t use straight powdered ginger, but rather an extract, equivalent to one or two teaspoons of ground ginger a day, which is lot of ginger.

Unlike garlic, there is some observational data supporting ginger consumption. Though it was just a cross-sectional study of a few hundred older individuals, those eating ginger appeared less likely to fall into the cognitively impaired group. Only 3 percent of those with mild cognitive impairment group ate ginger every day compared to 75 percent of those with normal cognition. Even if the correlation is real, because it was just a snapshot in time, we can’t tell which came first.

The most promising spice in this context may be black cumin (Nigella sativa). A month-long randomized controlled trial of a half a gram of ground black cumin seeds a day found positive cognitive effects among adolescents, but what about among the elderly? A group of older men were randomized to the same dose twice a day for nine weeks, which would come out to be about a third of a teaspoon a day. Compared to those randomized to placebo, the black cumin group performed significantly better on memory tests and some other cognitive measures, such as problem solving and reasoning, demonstrating the role of black cumin seed in enhancing memory, attention, and cognition, for about three cents a day. No evidence yet on epidemiological associations with dementia or cognitive decline, nor on the effects in women.