The importance of healthy food for students

Use food for success as a student.

The importance of healthy food for students

Healthy food can raise IQ, reduce the negative effects of stress, improve sleep, boost memory and increase energy levels. Unhealthy food will damage the brain, reduce your ability to concentrate and retain information, create hormonal imbalances and lower sleep quality.

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Importance of a balanced diet in a student's life 

Students depend on a balanced diet to get the nutrients that their brains need to function. A balanced diet improves natural energy production and therefore reduces the need for addictive stimulants and substances. Better eating choices lead to better learning and mental recovery.

What is a healthy diet for students?

The perfect diet for a young adult includes a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, good sources of protein, plenty of hydration and fewer processed foods that are high in sugar and simple carbohydrates. A good weight management diet can still provide all of the good nutrients that a student needs.

Eat what you need. Avoid what you don't need.

Benefits of healthy eating for students

These are the reasons why students need to eat healthy:

1. Healthy food can raise your IQ

Deccan Herald quotes studies that reveal how junk food lowers your IQ. Nuts like almonds and walnuts, seeds like flax seeds and sunflower seeds, brown rice instead of white rice, vegetables like spinach and broccoli and dried fruit like prunes will all increase your IQ.

This happens because your brain has the nutrients that it needs to strengthen the messages between its neurons, communicate with the central nervous system, form new mental pathways and expel toxic substances that hamper mental function.

Make sure that you eat at least five fresh fruit and vegetables every day, along with nuts and seeds, to get the IQ-boosting benefits of healthy food.

Eat this for better mental health.

2. Healthy food will reduce the negative effects of stress that students face

Your body makes a stress hormone called cortisol when you stress. Cortisol increases physical energy and tenses the muscles in preparation for the stressful situation. A little cortisol is good for you (too little can lead to low energy), but too much cortisol from stress is a bad thing.

Too much cortisol from work or studying can have the following negative effects:

1. Muscle breakdown and muscle weakness
2. Emotional responses like anxiety, depression and frustration
3. Lack of motivation and willpower
4. Decreased concentration
5. Increased likelihood of negative behaviors (like using addictive substances and over-consuming stimulants like caffeine)
6. Lower sleep quality and inability to recover (both physically and mentally)
7. Social withdrawal

Healthy foods feed your good gut bacteria. Good gut bacteria make a happy hormone called serotonin, which directly reduces the effects of stress and cortisol. 

If you eat a lot of healthy food, your mind will be capable of doing more work before you start to feel the negative consequences of stress. This can prolong study times before you need a mental break.

When you eat well, you feel well.

3. Food can improve sleep and recovery

Every student knows how important a good night's rest is for concentration and mental performance. Your brain uses sleep to turn information into memory. Unhealthy food like junk food that is high in sugar will disrupt good sleep.

You will have too much energy to sleep when your blood sugar is too high. The sugar crash that follows after eating unhealthy foods will also diminish quality sleep because your body does not have enough energy to go through the right recovery processes.

High fiber foods like fruit and vegetables, along with high protein foods like meat and fish, will supply your body with a more stable form of energy. It will also give you the nutrients that it needs to recover properly every day.

If sleep is one of the things that you struggle with as a student, check out this easy guide on how to get good sleep from the first night.

You need both to recover properly.

4. Students can use food to boost memory

The food that you eat will directly affect your memory. People who take fish oil supplements do better at remembering things compared to days when they don't take them, for example.

Foods that boost memory include fatty fish, blueberries, turmeric, pumpkin seeds, broccoli, nuts, dark chocolate, oranges, green tea and eggs.

Food that damage memory include white bread, white rice, pasta, sugar, processed cheese, processed meat and alcohol.

Choose food wisely.

5. Healthy eating increases energy

The food that you eat will determine your energy levels. If you eat garbage, you will feel like garbage. If you eat real food, you will feel real good. This is the premise of the saying, 'You are what you eat'.

When you consume too much sugar or too much caffeine, your body will lower your natural energy production to try to balance out the extra energy. This is called homeostasis.

The energy-lowering effects of bad food become worse soon afterwards. This is because withdrawal will exacerbate low energy production as soon as the sugar or caffeine leaves your body. That is why a sugar crash or a caffeine crash feels so horrible.

Energy production depends on your liver because that is where fat is converted into energy. Artificial ingredients in processed food keeps your liver so preoccupied that it can't create enough energy for the rest of your body - including your brain.

Antioxidants, on the other hand, help to keep the liver clean so that it can focus on other things. A clean liver does a better job at waking you up in the morning, putting you to sleep at night and giving you all of the energy that you need by breaking down fat molecules into fatty acids. You get these precious antioxidants from fresh fruit and vegetables.

The fiber in fresh produce also increases energy levels because they prolong the amount of time that it takes for the nutrients to enter into your body. This will stop your body from lowering its natural energy levels and still give you a steady flow of energy at the same time.

Healthy protein and good fat also work in the same manner to give you natural energy that lasts for hours.

Feel good with good food.

Why junk food is bad for students

Junk food might be convenient and cheap, but it is very bad for students. Here is why:

1. Junk food damages the brain

Junk food literally damages the brain. Rodents were fed with a junk food diet that is similar to the way that most Americans eat. Parts of their brain became inflamed from the first day.

The brain tried to adapt to the negative effects of the junk food (which wastes mental energy that could be used for studying), but could not cope with all of the junk food in the end. The negative effects of the junk food lasted for 8 months in the rodents. This would equate to a much longer time in humans.

The food that you eat can permanently change the way that your brain works. If you eat too much junk food or eat it for long enough, you can suffer from permanent brain damage as a result. Junk food causes mental illnesses like Alzheimer's, depression and Dementia.

Unhealthy eating has long term risks.

2. Bad food reduces your ability to concentrate and retain information

Processed food and junk food is typically very high in sugar. A typical serving of ketchup (or tomato sauce) floods your body with 2-5 times the amount of sugar that should be in your blood stream. Sugar hides in almost everything. Sugar is even added to French fries at fast food restaurants.

All of this sugar floods your brain with dopamine (the pleasure hormone that increases attention and memory). This sounds like a good thing, but it is not. Your brain will respond to the sudden increase of dopamine by producing less of it. The more sugar that you eat, the less dopamine your brain will make naturally.

This means that sugar will slowly decrease the amount of the good mental hormones that you need to enjoy life (leading to depression) and pay attention (leading to reduced concentration and memory).

Artificial sweeteners are just as bad for your brain as sugar. The more artificial sweeteners you consume, the more likely you are to have impaired brain function, dementia and stroke.

Don't do it.

3. Junk food negatively affects your hormones

This study found that fast food has dangerous chemicals that disrupt our hormonal balances and cause adverse effects like low sperm counts and birth defects. You are more likely to have problems with acne if you eat fast food.

Fast food also affects weight and energy regulating hormones like insulin. When you eat too much fast food, your insulin goes out of balance and you gain a lot of weight without being able to control it. Your body won't be able to use that extra storage as energy.

This leads to muscle weakness, lack of energy and motivation, weight gain, addiction to the foods that are causing these problems and a whole range or other health issues that we haven't discovered yet.

Your hair, skin and nails will look unhealthy because of these negative changes in your body. On top of that, your bones will weaken and break more easily.

Food affects more than you think.

4. Junk food enhances the effects of sleep deprivation

Sleep is extremely important for students. If you don't get enough sleep, you could struggle with moodiness, hampered concentration, fatigue, inability to learn new information, listlessness, depression and forgetfulness.

Large study volumes, project deadlines and test pressure can prevent students from getting all of the sleep that they need.

This study found that the effects of sleep deprivation were minimized when people ate a diet with the most plant-based foods and the least saturated fats and sugars (which comes from junk food). A plant-based diet, a high protein diet and a diet high in fats and sugars were analyzed.

The more plants you eat, the less tired you will feel throughout the day.

Junk food increases the effects of sleep deprivation. A student needs every hour of rest that they can get. They also need to have as much energy as possible to be successful in their studies. This is most possible when you avoid junk food.

Junk food will make you more tired than you actually are. Plants do the opposite.

Junk food worsens sleepiness.

Examples of junk food that students usually eat

These are the foods that you need to avoid

1. Fast food (from restaurants with a drive-through)
2. Potato crisps and chips
3. Processed meat and processed cheese
4. Soda's (all carbonated or sweetened drinks)
5. Instant noodles (like 2 minute noodles)
6. White bread
7. White rice
8. Sweets and candy
9. Anything that is high in sugar
10. Food with a lot of condiments like ketchup (tomato sauce), mustard and mayonnaise

Conclusion

Remember to check out the healthy eating plans that are linked at the top of this post. Both of them are designed for people on a budget (and don't have time to cook every meal).

The most important thing is that you avoid processed food and include whole fruit and vegetables along with complete proteins in your diet.

Healthy food does not need to be expensive food. Every student should eat the foods that will give them the best chance to succeed.

Share the above images on social media so that you will remember the key takeaways of this article. If you liked this post, please let me know in the comments below. Stay Strong!

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