Fuel Your Brain: The Best Nutrition for Optimal Work Performance
Your brain is the command centre of your work performance. What you fuel it with matters immensely when it comes to focus, productivity, and overall effectiveness – we focus a lot on keeping our brain nimble in terms of “mind exercise” – challenging work, puzzles, even keeping an active social life, but the truth is, the brain is of course, connected to the body – so keeping the body healthy keeps the mind healthy.
Fuel Your Brain: The Best Nutrition for Optimal Work Performance – Nutrition plays a critical role in improving your work performance – there is key research that examines the role of essential fatty acids (omega 3 – from fish oil) but other key nutrients are also essential for brain health, and by turn mental health – like the mineral zinc as a key player (found in nuts and seeds, and in animal products)
What is Optimal Nutrition?
Optimal nutrition is a diet that provides your body with the nutrients it needs for peak performance. It involves consuming a variety of nutrient-dense foods that support brain function, energy levels, and overall well-being.
This includes:
- Lean Proteins: Essential for muscle repair and cognitive function.
- As mentioned, Healthy Fats: Omega-3 fatty acids are particularly beneficial for brain health.
- Eat Real Food – ie food that is not processed – processed food is “brain rot” not least for the processed fats, sugar and salt it contains
- Vitamins and Minerals: Support various bodily functions, including brain health – better quality “real” food tends to have higher levels essential nutrients
- Hydration: Dehydration can impair cognitive function, so drink enough water – but the key to hydration is making sure you are eating enough high quality fat – essential fat, but also good quality saturated fat, like butter or coconut oil.
Fuel Your Brain
When business takes over at work, the first thing to be sacrificed is paying attention to nutrition – we tend to look at nutrition as fuel, a sort of petrol, rather than the complex and rich experience of actually eating, and nurturing all the mechanism of our bodies – we tend not to be mindful of the quality of the food we are eating even if we are trying to pick the healthy options – even if that food kind of looks healthy, it might be poor quality and have been sitting on the shelf for a long time, all the while losing its goodness.
Cooking Nutritional Food
There is no such thing as healthy convenience food, so cooking your own food after work is one of the most important thing you can do for your health now, but into the future “we dig our graves with our knives and forks” (just to cheer you up!) – Food is one of the most important environmental aspects of our health that we choose – and can influence – it is thought that 80 percent of ill health is from environmental factors and many we do not have control over – for example – chemicals (in the home, we might be able to influence but in the environment, we can’t), poor water, poor lighting – but food is an enormous part of the control we can exert over our own health. We all know how our energy is affected by a poor diet, but all of our biochemistry or the inner chemical mechanisms of our body are positively or negatively affected by the food we choose.
Organic Food
Food can either nurture our minds or ravage it – good food (and if you can afford it organic food) is stocked full of tiny elements (nutrients) that feed our brain – for example the B vitamins, so important for stress, magnesium, important for relaxation and muscle health, zinc (stress reduction) chromium ( for blood sugar management) – when we eat poor food, we run our bodies in deficient, and kind of nutrient overdraft, we are pulling resources from a poorly resourced body – and our health and our performance suffers as a result.
Eat Well on a budget
An added problem to eating good, nutritious food, is the “cost of living crisis” where we feel that we can steal money from our food budget to pay other bills – it is really hard, but not impossible to eat well on a budget – Bulk cooking, or joining a cooperative (I joined an organic cooperative where I can bulk buy as well – which makes it a lot cheaper to buy every day staples)
So, in summary it is hard to buy, cook and even find the time to sit down an eat good food – but look at it as an investment, not only for your long term health, but for your short term performance, and ability to concentrate and get the best out of your working day.
Kate Cook Biz Working Health: Optimal Work Performance
I offer expert guidance to unlock your peak work performance potential and help you understand how nutrition influences your cognitive abilities and productivity.
My strategies empower you to make informed choices about your diet, ensuring you’re nourishing your brain for sustained success.
If you would like Kate to talk to you about the foundation of all health, food and nutrition and it’s benefits then visit www.katecook.biz