I'd be all for preparing the meal he suggests, but with shopping, prep, cooking, and cleanup it's a significant time investment compared to pizza so I'd like evidence it's doing my startup better.
He ended up with some organ issues that put him in the hospital for a little while and when he got out he had to take it easy for awhile.
"Fatty foods slow down the brain and impair mental function, nutrition researchers have found. But they also make people more sociable." - http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/28/081.html
"Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance" - http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/fatty-foods-affect-...
"The greater your weight, the lower your IQ, say scientists" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1531487/The-greater-y...
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I think the culture change is needed.
Unless you're starving, your brain pretty much only runs only on glucose. That means that whatever you eat, good/bad fresh/packaged, whatever, just gets converted to glucose.
Assuming you're getting basic levels of required vitamins, I don't see any reason why one diet would be beneficial over another in terms of brain performance.
That's "reduced brain effectiveness" too.
No, you're making the claim you should already have more evidence to back it up than a snark.
it boggles the mind.
as it turns out, happy meals are, in fact, a great replacement for breast milk.
That's sort of beside the point though. I'm just tired of the ridiculous amount of misinformation in the diet, nutrition, and exercise fields. It's not like there isn't a long history of claims that are "just common sense" turning out completely wrong ("eating fat makes you fat", "eating high cholesterol food gives you high cholesterol" (mostly genetics), "diet and exercise are equally important to losing weight" (reality is that it's mostly diet), etc.)
Bottom line, if you're going to make a claim that certain food improve your brain's performance, you should have just a shred of evidence.
This doesn't even include the fact that some things in food directly affect the brain, such as caffeine.
When you eat fats, proteins and slower-digesting carbs the glucose regulation problem doesn't occur, at least not on the same scale, so your brain and body can perform undistributed for potentially many, many hours. Consequently the only problems come from nutritional content and digestive efficiency.
For elite endurance athletes there is still reason to "carb up" to pump as much glyogen into the muscles as possible, but that isn't most of us, and it isn't something you need for brain work.
I grew up eating nothing but TV dinners and ramen, in college I added pizza and fast food to the mix. Since I've gotten married I eat regular healthy meals. Anecdotally, I don't notice any difference in my brain function, but I do weigh 40 pounds more then college :)
http://bolthouse.com/our-products/beverages/proteins
..or you can eat it with water...
http://www.amazon.com/Organic-Food-Bar-Pure-Powerful-Bar/dp/...
Yes, it is more expensive than $0.25 per meal eating ramen noodles but it uses even less time than cooking the ramen and you can eat while you keep working easier.
To put it another way, how many startups that depend on doing original research get funded? I (perhaps foolishly) believe startups bring technology to the masses, but only after research shows it can be done.
I guess another argument would be, if you were to invest in a company, would you tie your investment to the founders to sleeping a minimum number of hours? Lack of sleep is easily as detrimental to mental fitness as poor diet.
However, not knowing which one is useful to you at any time, it's hard to know which is the most effective for work. But being mostly sober/mostly healthy is known to be the best (long-term) for staying alive and well, and startups are, on a human scale, a long-term game. You don't make $1,000,000 because you stayed up all night to ship.
Junk foods tend to send me off to sleep or procrastinate... the opposite of coffee.
The specifics are easily found on Google–go for it. The article I linked has some good information as well.
Just nitpicking here - by definition fiber is 'the indigestible parts of plant food'(1). So even if it can possibly be said that the body uses fiber - it is probably used in some non-nutritious way - we can be certain that the fiber does not reach the brain.