 When you search the medical literature for studies on berries, papers like this pop up a blueberry muffin rash, or pictures of strawberry tongues, or as a way to describe stool appearance. Though stools truly resembling current jelly are not very common. What is it with pathologist love affair with food terminology, grossest of which may be the way amoeba chest infections are described, where you spit up pus that looks like anchovy sauce, which sounds gross even without the pus. There are actual studies on berry supplementation, like on how they can mitigate the negative effects of a high saturated fat diet on the brain and behavior, but that was in mice. Maybe a better way to mitigate would be to not feed your pet mouse a stick of butter in the first place. Then there are studies on proprietary berry-based nutraceutical supplements purported to improve cognitive performance. See how there's steeper rise in the supplement group? Old hats will instantly recognize this as the timeless trick featured in the 1950s classic How to Lie with Statistics. See how they don't start the y-axis at zero? That's to inflate the appearance. Correct the graph, and you can see the effect doesn't quite look so impressive. There are studies of actual berries on actual humans, but when they're funded by berry industry trade groups, you get studies like this. An afternoon snack of berries reduces subsequent energy intake. Great, but that's compared to candy. Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, fantastic compared to a handful of jelly babies, which are just like coated gummy bears. Do berries offer so little that you have to compare them to candy to make them look good? There was that famous Harvard study I did a video about where berry eating appeared to delay brain aging by up to two and a half years, but you don't know if it's caused an effect until you put it to the test. And blueberry supplementation was able to improve memory in older adults in just 12 weeks time, but that was feeding them up to six cups of wild blueberries a day. Now this was a proof-of-concept pilot study, just to see if they get any effect. We just didn't have any studies using more realistic doses until now. How about just a cup a day of blueberries? They found that the addition of easily achievable quantities of blueberries to the diets of older adults can improve some aspects of cognition, like long-term memory. In terms of the number of errors the placebo group got worse, the blueberry group got better. You can even correlate the cognitive improvements with enhanced brain activation, using fancy brain scan technology to actually visualize the improved blood flow to those same regions of the brain caused by the blueberry consumption. Does it work in kids too? Blueberry treatments have shown positive effects on cognition in both rats and adult humans, but do these benefits transfer to children, human children? How about a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study comparing about a couple blueberries to two cups to zero cups? What did they find? Cognitive performance improvements across all measures and the more berries the better. And this wasn't after 12 weeks of eating berries, but within hours of just a single blueberry meal. Sounds like a good breakfast any day our kids are having their exams.