Who doesn’t love ice cream? That scoop of pure indulgence that satiate all your senses in an instant. It just makes everything better. For all those who get what I am talking about, I have a piece of really good news.
A Japanese scientist and a professor at Tokyo’s Kyorin University — Yoshihiko Koga — has claimed that eating ice cream for breakfast can actually make you smarter and improve performance.
Whaaaaaat?
Yea. If this research is to be believed, time to scream for more ice cream.
This man carried out a series of trials in which participants completed mental exercises on a computer and found that participants’ performances improved after eating ice cream immediately after waking up. He split the participants into two groups — one of which was instructed to eat ice cream — and asked both to complete a series of mental puzzles on a computer immediately after they woke up.
After monitoring the brain activities of all the participants, he found that the group that consumed ice cream first thing in the morning not only had an increase in high-frequency alpha waves, which are linked to elevated levels of alertness and reduced mental irritation, but also, performed better than the other group, The Telegraph reported.
To check if the cold nature of the ice cream was the reason behind the result, Prof Koga repeated the test with cold water. It did slightly improve the performance but not as conspicuously as the ice cream did.
Although the idea of having ice cream for breakfast seems amazing, some British nutritionists have advised against it.
Nutritionist Jo Travers, author of The Low-Fad Diet, told The Huffington Post,
For one, it is pretty novel to have ice cream for breakfast and this might cause some excitement in our brains. Another thing is that your brain will be receiving nutrients when you eat ice cream, including glucose – it’s preferred fuel – and that might also have an affect on reaction times.
Another Nutrition consultant Charlotte Stirling-Reed, from SR Nutrition, told HuffPost UK that she “certainly wouldn’t” recommend ice cream for breakfast.” Instead, she advised having a breakfast of porridge and fruit, salmon or scrambled free range egg on toast, or whole grain, low sugar breakfast cereals.
Well, at least now we know what to eat before taking a test or an exam.