A team of British researchers found that school children are better able to concentrate and memorize information after having consumed wild blueberries.
This news has naturally been well received by wild blueberry harvesters, who can now advertise their crop as a super-student elixir at a time when children are having to overcome more and more distractions to learn.
As most Mainers know, this state produces the lion’s share of the world’s wild blueberries, with annual harvests ranging from just under 90 million pounds to more than 100 million pounds. Maine’s wild blueberry crop contributes an estimated $90 million to the state’s annual economy.
The new study was led by Prof. Claire Williams, from the School of Psychology & Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading. During a three-week period in late spring of 2012, her team provided a group of students between the ages of 7 and 10 years old daily beverages before having them engage in a series of staggered cognitive tests.
The beverages either included high doses of wild blueberries (about 1.75 cups), moderate doses of wild blueberries (about three-quarters of a cup) or no wild blueberries at all.
“[O]ne test focused on delayed recognition, where the children were asked to remember 15 words from a list of 50 approximately 20 to 25 minutes after hearing them. When compared to performance at baseline, the children recognized more words following consumption of the high dose wild blueberry drinks (a 9 percent improvement) as compared to the placebo (a 3 percent decrease). Improved performance on [another] task, where the children were required to ignore distracting stimuli, indicated that concentration levels in the wild blueberry rich groups also increased.”
