Question: Hi, Do the vitamins in your diet affect how the neurons in your brain transfer information, and their ability to retain it, through the neural connections? Through this, if a young child ate more vitamins would it therefore have larger chance of being more intelligent than if they had less viatimins in their diet? Thanks, Andrew

Jemma Ransom answered on 21 Mar 2011:

Yet another good question!

There is evidence that vitamin A effects the connections in the brain. There’s research going on into this in the lab currently. We find that mice who are chronically exposed to vitamin A (more specifically the active form retinoic acid) there are changes in the structure of neurons which indicate a higher level of connections between cells. This is in addition to the role that retinoic acid plays in the process of neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons). We don’t yet know precisely how vitamin A regulates either of these process, but it is clear that it can alter the number of neurons in the brain, and the number of connections between neurons in the brain.If we work on the logic that more connections=more memory (which is by know means decided upon yet) then yes vitamin A probably has a role here.
As for the amount of vitamins a child eats, as I said in my previous answer, the body is very good at keeping circulating levels of nutrients and vitamins at the correct levels, so it is unlikely that simply increasing intake of vitamins would have an effect on cognition. What we are more interested in is the level of certain molecules called enzymes that convert vitamin A into its most useful form in the brain. It may be that people who are more susceptible to brain disease have a genetic disposition to a lack of these enzymes so they can’t therefore use the vitamin A in the blood stream. I think therefore that the ability to process vitamin A is much more important than the level of vitamin A in the blood stream.

Hope this answers your question.