Researchers in Poland examined whether the relationship between food and memory differed from one meal to another. Instead of looking only at overall diet, they considered breakfast, the afternoon meal and the evening meal separately. Across two studies, their clearest associations concerned what people regularly ate in the evening. Frontiers in Nutrition (source, opens in new tab)
Frontiers in NutritionMeal-specific dietary patterns relate to memory functioningOpen source (opens in new tab)
The first study involved 77 adults. Participants reported their eating habits and answered questions about how well their memory worked in everyday life. Researchers then scored each meal according to the foods eaten, using a classification of potentially less-healthful choices. Higher evening meal scores were associated with poorer self-reported memory. The scores for breakfast and the afternoon meal did not show a statistically significant association.
The second study went beyond asking people about their memory: it tested them. Its 355 participants completed a dietary survey and online tasks measuring two abilities. One was recognising pictures they had seen before. The other was holding information in mind for a short time, known as short-term-memory capacity.
Two evening eating patterns were associated with poorer picture-recognition performance. A pattern the researchers called “Western-style” included sweets, salty snacks and alcohol. An “animal-based” pattern included dairy, eggs, fish and meat. Participants whose evening meals more closely followed either pattern tended to do worse on the recognition task. Neither pattern showed a significant association with short-term-memory capacity.
These findings concern differences between people with different habitual diets. The researchers did not give participants particular dinners and test their memory afterwards, or change their diets to see whether performance improved. The results therefore identify associations, without establishing that the meals caused them.
Looking more closely at individual foods, cheese had the strongest association with poorer self-reported memory in the first study. In the second, sweets and desserts and milk-based products showed the strongest associations with poorer picture recognition. These findings do not establish that every food in the broader eating patterns had the same relationship with memory.
The studies, published together in Frontiers in Nutrition, covered adults aged 20–90 overall. The paper uses “supper” for the final evening meal and “dinner” for the afternoon meal, following the Polish meal pattern.
Both studies relied on participants reporting their own diets. The second used online testing and had a predominantly female sample. Sleep was not measured, so its possible role in the relationship remained unresolved. Neither study tracked memory decline over time.
The useful distinction is between identifying a pattern and showing how to change an outcome. This research suggests that examining individual meals may help explain associations between diet and particular memory abilities. Whether changing the evening meal improves those abilities remains unanswered.
- Frontiers in Nutrition · Peer-reviewed studyMeal-specific dietary patterns relate to memory functioningfrontiersin.org · opens in new tab
