Macronutrient composition of a morning meal and the maintenance of attention throughout the morning

Abstract

Background: At present, the impact of macronutrient composition and nutrient intake on sustained attention in adults is unclear, although some prior work suggests that nutritive interventions that engender slow, steady glucose availability support sustained attention after consumption. A separate line of evidence suggests that nutrient consumption may alter electroencephalographic markers of neurophysiological activity, including neural oscillations in the alpha-band (8–14 Hz), which are known to be richly interconnected with the allocation of attention. It is here investigated whether morning ingestion of foodstuffs with differing macronutrient compositions might differentially impact the allocation of sustained attention throughout the day as indexed by both behavior and the deployment of attention-related alpha-band activity.

Methods: Twenty-four adult participants were recruited into a three-day study with a cross-over design that employed a previously validated sustained attention task (the Spatial CTET). On each experimental day, subjects consumed one of three breakfasts with differing carbohydrate availabilities (oatmeal, cornflakes, and water) and completed blocks of the Spatial CTET throughout the morning while behavioral performance, subjective metrics of hunger/fullness, and electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements of alpha oscillatory activity were recorded.

Results: Although behavior and electrophysiological metrics changed over the course of the day, no differences in their trajectories were observed as a function of breakfast condition. However, subjective metrics of hunger/fullness revealed that caloric interventions (oatmeal and cornflakes) reduced hunger across the experimental day with respect to the non-caloric, volume-matched control (water). Yet, no differences in hunger/fullness were observed between the oatmeal and cornflakes interventions.

Conclusion: Observation of a relationship between macronutrient intervention and sustained attention (if one exists) will require further standardization of empirical investigations to aid in the synthesis and replicability of results. In addition, continued implementation of neurophysiological markers in this domain is encouraged, as they often produce nuanced insight into cognition even in the absence of overt behavioral changes.

ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03169283

Keywords:

• Attention
• Cognition
• EEG
• Breakfast
• Vigilance
• Alpha-band
• Oscillations

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Sydney Jacobs and Haleigh Smith for help with data collection. Participants in this study were recruited and evaluated at the Human Clinical Phenotyping Core, a facility of the Rose F. Kennedy Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC), which is funded through a center grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD HD071593).

Disclaimer statements

Contributors None.

Funding This work was primarily supported by a grant from the Pepsi Corporation (Pepsi-Co) to Dr Foxe (PEP 1323).

Conflicts of interest The views expressed in this manuscript are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of Pepsi-Co Inc. Dr Wilson received partial support from a National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Medical Scientist Training Program Grant (T32 GM007288).

Ethics approval Procedures and protocols were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

ORCID

Michael J. Gray http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2841-980X