I love blueberries 🫐

How their immediate benefits helped me build a healthier lifestyle

May 20, 2025

Over the years, I've read many articles and books that talk about wellbeing from a psychological perspective. Last year, I discovered How to Build a Healthy Brain by Kimberley Wilson, which offered a refreshingly different take by exploring brain health from a physical standpoint.

Pick it up and I guarantee you that you will learn something new and practical about almost any aspect of your life where you can make small improvements to benefit your brain health now and in the future, for example, by becoming more resilient against forms of dementia and depression.

The book dives into stress, nutrition, emotions, breath, and other topics, like exercise:

“Regular exercise is associated with greater hippocampal and overall brain volume. Since the brain naturally starts to shrink by 1–2 per cent per year starting around the age of 40, regular exercise can, in effect, reverse brain ageing. For the moment, exercise is the closest thing we have to the fountain of eternal youth.”

I read this at exactly the right time. I did not get much movement other than walking, cycling while commuting, and Berlin nights filled with dancing (but also alcohol). When I read the book, I had already experienced that regular exercise was doing wonders to melt away the depression I had been struggling with. However, there was a sense of hopelessness, approaching 40 years old, that somehow it was too late to get fit or build new habits. I was wrong, and the evidence was right in front of me. I didn’t need disciplined ‘positive thinking’, but the almost physically causal; move a bit more and get materially healthier in return. Simple.

It’s not like I would have disputed such facts before. I just didn’t know how I would ever make it apply to myself. I felt like it would need a drastic lifestyle shift. Learning about all the little ways you can make improvements helped, though, and one year later, I can truly say I’m fitter than I’ve been in almost 2 decades. Change is made one step at a time — it turned out I just need to find 1,000 possible steps forward, so I can select one that is actually appealing.

Like blueberries 🫐

Wilson writes in detail about nutrition and how it affects our brains. The book also dives into various food types like herbs, spices, beans, alliums, cocoa, coffee, and berries and describes specific benefits, studies, and how to work them into your diet (emphasis mine):

“Some of the most exciting research in Nutritional Psychiatry comes from the profound acute and long-term effects of berries on the brain. The equivalent of 200g of fresh blueberries (they used freeze-dried ones in the study) increased blood levels of BDNF an hour later and immediately improved attention and short-term memory. In another study 200g of fresh blueberries resulted in improved word recall in children, and improved their accuracy on tests. Blackcurrants improved attention during a long, cognitively fatiguing task and cherries are linked with better mental flexibility, the ability to switch from one task to another.”

This really stuck out because it felt so simple and immediate. I decided to look more into the second blueberry study. In the 2015 study, researchers at the University of Reading gave a group of schoolchildren a drink made from 200 grams of wild blueberries and then asked them to complete memory and attention tests. Another group did the same tasks without the blueberries. Team blueberry’s focus was sharper and their accuracy higher, just a hours after ingestion.

The immediacy of the benefits changed something in my mind. Suddenly, that arduous lifestyle change to get long-term benefits was broken down into “have some blueberries today” and “add a little nutmeg to my morning coffee”, which evolved into a more varied diet in general.

Blueberries are awesome. Studies have linked them with slower cognitive decline, the protection of brain cells and enhancement of neuroplasticity. It’s not a wonder cure, though. For example, a study that gave two groups of people a blueberry or placebo drink found that the placebo group had a greater reduction of depressive symptoms.

If blueberries, or berries in general, are not part of your diet, introduce them. The benefits are immediate. Then keep building variety and make your brain healthier.

They say the world you experience through your senses reflects your nervous system. Your brain is the control centre of that, processing everything you sense and interpreting it through context, memory, and emotion. Take care of that brain, and the world will literally become more beautiful.

(- ‿- ) For your ears

All you need to know about J.G.G. is that he began making music under this name “after a dream in which he discovered a melody capable of bringing about the end of the world.” His latest album, BOMBOLLA, traverses the realms of psychedelic, exotica, and early electronica with heartwarming melodies.

(◕‿◕✿) For your eyes

I’ve long admired the work of the multidisciplinary artist Tea Stražičić, aka FluffLord. Their work encompasses many mediums from sculptures, drawings, 3D digital, and paintings. What I personally love is the universe of characters that often have lore behind them. I highly recommend digging deep through their website and giving a follow on Instagram.