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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of diet on cognition and flight performance of 45 pilots. Based on a theory of self-care, this clinical study used a repeated-measure, counterbalanced crossover design. Pilots were randomly rotated through 4-day high-carbohydrate, high-protein, high-fat, and control diets. Cognitive flight performance was evaluated using a GAT-2 full-motion flight simulator. The Sternberg short-term memory test and Vandenberg's mental rotation test were used to validate cognitive flight test results. Pilots consuming a high-protein diet had significantly poorer (p < .05) overall flight performance scores than pilots consuming high-fat and high-carbohydrate diets.
Acknowledgment
This study was funded by the U.S. Army Biomedical Research Award #DAMD17-03-1-0010 and the National Institutes of Health Grant 1C06RR022088-01.
We wish to thank all the hard-working student research assistants who worked with this research project and contributed to the successful submission of this manuscript.