CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – As a chef-turned-nutritional neuroscientist, I explore how the food we eat impacts the way we think. As a part of my graduate training, I design dietary interventions.
The “cupcakes” in the image above are actually not cupcakes at all. They’re 90 percent egg powder with a dash of sugar and flour. In academic speak, they’re “tightly controlled isocaloric vessels of lutein that will serve as the intervention of a randomized control trial in preadolescents with below-average retinal lutein levels.”
Lutein, a carotenoid found in eggs, avocados and leafy green plant sources, is all about helping the brain function. By having subjects eat a “cupcake” filled with lutein a day, we anticipate seeing improvements in attention, memory and neural efficiency in as little as a month.
This was the first successful attempt of many, many recipes to create a product that met all our nutrient criteria and that a preadolescent would look forward to eating every day. The fact that it was the first recipe I tried with sprinkles was just a magic bonus.
Editor’s notes:
Follow Caitlyn Edwards on Instagram: @ieatforme
The Image of Research is a multidisciplinary competition celebrating the diversity and breadth of graduate student research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The semifinalists have been selected based on their submissions’ originality, visual impact and the connection between image, text and research.
The Image of Research is organized by the Scholarly Commons of the University Library and the Graduate College, and is supported by a gift from the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics. To see all 25 semifinalists and for more details about the competition, go to the #imageofresearch18 Instagram account.
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