Brain Food

Living things need to feed themselves, which is why evolution has devoted so much effort to the pursuit of food. For billions of years, new strategies have been developing, such as sensory and motor skills: we – in the broadest sense, including single-celled organisms – need to know where food is and how to get there. This has led to a veritable arms race between predator and prey, with a motivational system as the psychological icing on the cake: food is a source of pleasure! Nature attaches only reproduction a similarly high value.

Supermarkets, junk food, and global corporations producing sugary drinks with billion-dollar marketing budgets are relatively recent evolutionary developments to which our bodies have not yet fully adapted. This leads to health problems such as diabetes – whose link to dementia we are only just discovering. But it's not just us; our microbiotic cohabitants also pose some problems for the food industry. And they, too, influence what goes on between our ears. Overall, the signaling pathways of hunger, homeostasis, and hedonia are extremely complex.

We discuss all of this here, but of course this website is primarily about the brain. And the brain occupies a special position in the body: not only is it given preferential treatment when energy is scarce and gets its share when all other organs have long since slowed down their activity. No, the human brain is also supplied with an excessive amount of luxury, consuming a quarter of the total: 3.3 billion glucose molecules. Per minute. Per neuron. And we have 86 billion of them.

The brain is always hungry —that's Nicole Paschek's hors d'oeuvre for our menu of mental nourishment.
We hope you enjoy your meal!