If Dr. Kalipada Pahan's research pans out, the standard advice for failing students might one day be: Study harder and eat your cinnamon!
Pahan a researcher at Rush University and the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Chicago, has found that cinnamon turns poor learners into good ones--among mice, that is. He hopes the same will hold true for people.
If Dr. Kalipada Pahan's research pans out, the standard advice for failing students might one day be: Study harder and eat your cinnamon!
Pahan a researcher at Rush University and the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Chicago, has found that cinnamon turns poor learners into good ones--among mice, that is. He hopes the same will hold true for people.
His group published their latest findings online June 24, 2016, in the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology.
"The increase in learning in poor-learning mice after cinnamon treatment was significant," says Pahan. "For example, poor-learning mice took about 150 seconds to find the right hole in the Barnes maze test. On the other hand, after one month of cinnamon treatment, poor-learning mice were finding the right hole within 60 seconds."
Pahan's research shows that the effect appears to be due mainly to sodium benzoate--a chemical produced as cinnamon is broken down in the body.
If that chemical sounds familiar, you may have noticed it on the ingredient labels of many processed foods. Food makers use a synthetic form of it as a preservative. It is also an FDA-approved drug used to treat hyperammonemia--too much ammonia in the blood.
Though some health concerns exist regarding sodium benzoate, most experts agree it's perfectly safe in the amounts generally consumed. One reassuring point is that it's water-soluble and easily excreted in the urine.
Cinnamon acts as a slow-release form of sodium benzoate, says Pahan. His lab studies show that different compounds within cinnamon--including cinnamaldehyde, which gives the spice is distinctive flavor and aroma--are "metabolized into sodium benzoate in the liver. Sodium benzoate then becomes the active compound, which readily enters the brain and stimulates hippocampal plasticity."
Those changes in the hippocampus--the brain's main memory center--appear to be the mechanism by which cinnamon and sodium benzoate exert their benefits.
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Image credit: Simon A. Eugster via Wikimedia Commons.
