But they could too Promote the cognitive development and psychological maturation of adolescentsaccordingly new research from Spain.
The researchers recruited 700 students aged 11 to 16 from different high schools in Barcelona and divided them into two groups: those who were not offered walnuts and those who were offered 30 grams of walnuts daily for six months.
They found that adolescents who ate walnuts for at least 100 days during this time — not necessarily consecutively, but cumulatively — experienced better concentration, and those who had ADHD saw significantly improved behavior.
According to the researchers, the study’s teens also experienced an intelligence boost — a trait that has less to do with traditional learning and more to do with an inherent ability to solve complex tasks like pattern identification and puzzles.
The findings can likely be attributed to walnuts’ alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) — a type of omega-3 that plays an essential role in brain development, especially during puberty — researchers say. During this time, hormones stimulate synaptic growth in the frontal lobe of the brain, which is responsible for complex emotional and cognitive functions, Jordi Julvez – the study’s principal investigator and a neuroscientist at the Clinical and Epidemiological Neuroscience Group in Spain – said in a Press release about the study.
“Neurons well nourished with this type of fatty acid can grow and form new, stronger synapses,” he adds.
While adolescence is certainly a complex time for both young adults and parents, something as simple as offering a “handful of walnuts a day, or at least thrice a week” could result in “many significant improvements in cognitive ability.” Ariadna Pinar — a biologist at the Institut d’Investigació Sanitària Pere Virgili in Spain who worked on the study — said about it in a press release.
“It would help them meet the challenges of adolescence and entering adulthood,” she says.
Seeing benefits requires “strong commitment, and few people will stick to it,” the authors note. Still, “compliance may change once the general public learns of the positive results from those who do comply.”
Researchers plan to soon study walnut consumption in pregnant women and its effects on the same traits in infants.