Can a special diet promote children’s focus?
By ETHAN SIMMONS
A diet rich in fiber and antioxidants, low in fat and full of colorful berries and vegetables has shown a strong connection to slowed cognitive decline in older adults. This same Mediterranean-influenced diet shows promise for children’s mental abilities, too.
A recent study led by University of Illinois Health and Kinesiology Assistant Professor Shelby Keye compared elementary school kids’ food intake to this specific diet pattern—fittingly called the MIND diet—and measured how those kids performed on a task designed to challenge their attention span.
Keye and a team of researchers, including Health and Kinesiology Associate Professor Naiman Khan and Illinois Nutritional Sciences Ph.D. candidate Tori Holthaus, found that the school children who more closely adhered to this special diet showed better control over their attention.
“When we see something in older adults, we're like, ‘I wonder if we're going to see that same thing with kids?’” Keye said. “That was the question: will the MIND diet be related to children's cognitive skills?’”
The MIND diet is short for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay. It’s a combination of the popular Mediterranean diet—which prioritizes beans, leafy vegetables, berries, seafood and olive oil—and the DASH diet, originally built to combat hypertension.
Researchers at Rush University in Chicago combined elements of these two diets and found certain components were related to better cognitive health in older adults.
To investigate whether the MIND diet had positive effects for kids’ brain health, the research team decided to study a pressing skill for any school-age child: paying attention.
In early life, the human brain is developing all of its cognitive skills simultaneously. But in certain phases of development, specific skills are growing faster and are more sensitive to a person’s changes in health, Keye said.
“Attention and inhibition around that elementary age is a particularly sensitive skill to health behaviors,” Keye said. “It may be because you have started school. And now, you're in this environment where you have to inhibit, you have to prevent yourself from turning around and talking to your friend or even inhibit yourself from listening to internal thoughts.”
Their study marks the first time the MIND diet has been analyzed in a population this young. The diet’s connection to attention control opens the gates for more specific, involved research into the diet’s potential effects.
“With us finding this relationship with the MIND diet, that means that those foods that are important for older adults could be just as important for children,” Keye said.
An illustration of the MIND Diet. (Provided by Tori Holthaus)
To answer their question, the research team collected a week’s worth of dietary records for 129 local children, ages 7 to 11 years old. Parents of the child participants were tasked with recording everything their kid ate or drank for seven days, in close consultation with their children.
The children’s diets were scored on their proximity to the MIND diet pattern versus the most recent Healthy Eating Index, a set of dietary guidelines developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The two diets are similar but emphasize different food groups: The MIND diet encourages more berries and olive oil, for example.
Before gathering their diet records, the researchers collected the children’s demographic and anthropometric data—height, weight, age and the like. And each participant completed a cognitive test designed to challenge their focus, called the Eriksen-Flanker task.
The task asks participants to look at a series of rapidly flashing arrows pointing in different directions on a computer screen, and mark which direction the arrow in the center of the image was pointing. (For kids, the arrows are replaced with pictures of fish.)
The children who ate foods closer to the MIND diet scored more accurately on the attention task. The positive relationship did not show significant differences based on the children’s overall caloric intake, sex or household income.
No significant relationship was found with the kids’ scores on the Healthy Eating Index guidelines.
“This is one study, and it’s one of the first,” Keye said. “But because we found a relationship, there is most likely something there.”
As for why the diet had a relationship to attention control, Keye said a few possibilities are worth further research.
Many of the dark green vegetables and berries present in the MIND diet are rich in antioxidants, which have an anti-inflammatory effect that helps with brain development and function, she said.
Weight could also play a role. A separate study found that children who followed the MIND diet had a lower weight status on average—a higher weight status can relate to greater levels of inflammation and poorer cognitive performance.
Also, physical activity and diet quality tend to go together in people, Keye said. It could be that the kids who ate more MIND diet foods focused better because of a healthier, more active lifestyle.
Is the evidence enough to start changing children’s diets? More research is needed into the potential cause-and-effect, but if the benefits interest you, “I would not stray away,” Keye said.
“I always try to just keep it simple while doing this type of work. Sometimes I find that people will read about this and say, ‘I've got to change all these things about my life,’” Keye said. “I study behavior change a little bit, and I find that it's easier to start simple and do one thing.”
If the MIND diet’s potential benefits seem compelling, try adding in some berries and smoothies into your meal plan, or cooking with olive oil instead of butter for a week, Keye suggested.
For now, the results from this study present a few next steps. Future studies can run diet interventions, where researchers control participants’ food intake to fit the MIND diet and observe any effects. Researchers could also make the same analysis of diet and attention control in an even younger group of child participants, or with a wider range of socioeconomic status.
“We're just excited to be doing the work and excited to have some interesting results,” Keye said. “And hopefully, one day, we can get a good intervention.”
To contact Shelby Keye, email skeye2@illinois.edu
The paper, “MIND Diet Pattern Is Associated with Attentional Control in School-Aged Children,” was published in the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement in January 2025. It is available online.