Understanding Adolescence as a Critical Period for Immediate and Long-term Cognitive Health Impact

Filling a Critical Gap

Bridging the Evidence Gap in Adolescent Brain Nutrition

It is well-established that the prenatal period and infancy (the first 1000 days) are critical for cognitive development, and nutrition during these periods can impact cognitive performance later in life. Specific nutrients are therefore emphasized during pregnancy and infancy, to include choline, iron, folate and iodine, with emerging evidence for a role of many other nutrients and food components. Less attention has been paid to the effects of nutrition in early childhood through adolescence. It is notable that a systematic review was published in January 2022 examining the effects of nutritional interventions on cognitive development in children ages 1 through 6 years (Roberts et al. 2022). Positive effects were identified for supplementation with iron and other nutrients, as well as for fish intake.

The Cognitive Health Committee explores how dietary patterns, foods, nutrients and bioactive food components support optimization and maintenance of cognitive performance and mood- and emotion-related outcomes. See recent publications and upcoming events to learn more about the committee’s work.

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The IAFNS committee was not able to identify this type of review for adolescence, either examining effects of nutrients consumed during adolescence on cognitive performance at that age, or later in life. In fact, a recent series on nutrition in adolescence published in the Lancet (see Patton et al. 2022) notes that adolescence has been overlooked as a critical growth period, citing the examples of a complete lack of adolescent-specific targets in the Sustainable Development Goals for nutrition. Other than two systematic reviews on related, but peripheral topics, there do not appear to be other reviews, systematic or otherwise, on the topic of the role of nutrient intake broadly in cognitive development and performance during adolescence – or effects of nutrients in adolescence on cognition later in life, indicating a need to document what is known as well as knowledge gaps to support and motivate more work in this area.

Project Investigators

Hayley Young, PhD
Swansea University

Open Science

Aligned with IAFNS’ commitment to open science practices, this project has been added to the IAFNS Collection on the Open Science Framework. Note: this link redirects you to an external website.