Open The impact of food on cognition: Potential implications for brain fog in ME;24 June 2020 online

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
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The impact of food on cognition: Potential implications for brain fog in ME
24 June 2020

This study is looking to recruit both healthy individuals and those with a diagnosis of MILD ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue). The aim is to investigate how food impacts your performance on 2 short cognitive tests, a colour naming task and a memory task.
Participants will be allocated to either a food or no food group & will take the 2 cognitive tasks online before and after either your evening meal or a 30 minute break with no food. The study takes place between 5pm & 8pm."

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Ethical approval
This research has been reviewed and approved by Arden University Psychology Departments ethics committee on 23.6.20.

About the researcher
This study is part of the researchers dissertation to achieve their MSc Psychology degree."

full details
https://www.callforparticipants.com...on-potential-implications-for-brain-fog-in-me
 
30 minute break with “no food” is hardly a “no food” situation! Most of whatever you ate 30mins ago will still be digesting! Surely a longer gap (say 3 hours or more) would be a more realistic “no food” situation. Half an hour after food would be “fed” in my view!
 
I'm too old. What is it with these people excluding older patients?

Plus I wouldn't regard myself as "mild" ME either.

They should be looking at moderate cases, who would probably be only to happy to take part, even if it did mean crashing. If only "mild" cases are looked at it probably won't tell us much.
 
Keela Too said:
30 minute break with “no food” is hardly a “no food” situation! Most of whatever you ate 30mins ago will still be digesting! Surely a longer gap (say 3 hours or more) would be a more realistic “no food” situation. Half an hour after food would be “fed” in my view!
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The idea is to do a cognitive test before the evening meal and afterwards. The no food group will wait 30 minutes instead of eating and then redo the test.
 
It seems obvious that in order to standardise food intake that, in the absence of instructions stating whether or not to limit eating before hand, that everyone will be fed immediately upon arrival, so everyone starts from a similar base.

Whilst the idea of this 'study' sounds 'interesting' I would suspect that if there is, as seems likely, an effect, it is likely that this will be linked to the amount of food, and/or possibly the type.

e.g 100g of steak is likely to have a different effect to 100g of mars bars, or even apples, all of which I would expect to have a slightly different effect, at least in noticeability, to a kilo of something, maybe swiss style muesli lol.
 
Not sure that would work Wonko. Cos then the unfed group would have been recently fed. Surely better to tell everyone to start from an empty stomach (3-4hours since food) situation.

Edit to add: Perhaps there will be better instructions after sign-up??
 
I assumed it was looking for immediate effects, like blood supply being diverted from brain to stomach, or is that an old wives tale? Thinking clearly might be more difficult after a heavy meal, but on the other hand if your blood sugar is low or you're very hungry, a light meal may help you think better.
 
Mij said:
Pretty sure this this workshop will lead nowhere.
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Even if something were to come from this, I can't see how it would be relevant. By the usual standards it's not completely useless but I can't see the potential use here. Doesn't seem like a good use of resources. All those small badly controlled experiments have amounted to nothing, it's just busywork.
 
It's a student project for an MSc. The main point of such projects is to do soemthing that produces data so they can show they can do a bit of a literature search, design and experiment, analyse data and write up the results and conclusions, all in the space of a few months. I wouldn't expect too much, we've seen worse.
 
Trish said:
I assumed it was looking for immediate effects, like blood supply being diverted from brain to stomach, or is that an old wives tale? Thinking clearly might be more difficult after a heavy meal, but on the other hand if your blood sugar is low or you're very hungry, a light meal may help you think better.
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Yes. But the problem comes when you throw ME into the mix. Is digestion too much of an exertion for the pwME in the study? Will they even screen for that? If I'm on the end of my limit a meal can cause me to crash (and the macros of the meal might be important, how digestable the food is, details I don't believe a psych msc has knowledge about). Being hungry might also be too much exertion given all the things the body does to maintain blood sugar/otherwise keep the system running on low energy. (Although how long the participants have been without food is not mentioned, so this might not come into it)

Yes a msc is for learning, it's still sad if the project is badly designed. I don't like the excuse about time, if the time limit is such that the project can't be done properly then really what's the point? Learning to do shoddy work? (There might be more to it that's not shared, though)
 
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