Brain Food: A Scroller About Some Nutritious Fare

Let’s start with a ripe yellow banana. A very healthy food, right? Lots of potassium! But scroll down to find out which humdrum food has twice as much of the essential electrolyte bananas are famous for.

That's right, the humble potato! Potatoes are one of the richest food sources of potassium, which is important for muscle contraction and helps regulate fluid balance in the body. They also have a significant amount of vitamin C, folate, and magnesium.

(Just make sure to eat your potato with some butter or other fat. It helps slow down digestion of the starch and improve your body's absorption of the potato's nutrients. It also tastes good.)

Speaking of potassium, avocados are another excellent source of the electrolyte, along with other nutrients, especially folate, which works with vitamin B12 in the production of red blood cells.

Let’s get some protein to go with all this potassium. How about some liver? No, seriously — it’s a wonder food: one of the richest sources of vitamin A and vitamin B12, key nutrients for your bones, skin and brain.

Prefer seafood? Try cod liver instead (in a salad with boiled eggs and onion, for instance). It too has a significant helping of vitamin A along with vitamin D, which promotes absorption of calcium in the gut.

The egg to go with your cod liver is also a truly wondrous food, high in vitamin B12, vitamin A, folate, and cholesterol (a misunderstood nutrient critical for brain function).

If you want to stock up on beneficial omega-3 fatty acids as well as B12, try some herring. This fish, often neglected in the US, is full of nutrients, and delicious fishy flavor (an acquired taste, to be sure).

Herring, for instance, is superior nutritionally in many ways to the more popular tuna.

Let's add some veggies to the mix. As your mother likely told you, eat your broccoli — it has a fantastic nutritional profile, high in folate, potassium, fiber, and, perhaps surprisingly, vitamin C.

Peas have gone out of style but are another excellent food, high in many of the same nutrients as broccoli but also packing significant protein.

Feeling a cold coming on? You could eat an orange for vitamin C — or a bell pepper. Just half a pepper has roughly the same amount of the nutrient as an orange.

Another food you may want to eat when sick is ... oysters! The bivalve is absolutely brimming with zinc, with 6 oysters containing a whopping 347% of your recommended daily allowance, along with significant B12 and vitamin D.

So far the foods we've seen haven't had as much magnesium as the body needs. For this, you can snack on some spinach, another extremely nutritious food. Just add some olive oil and garlic for flavor.

Another excellent source of magnesium is whole grains. Take quinoa, which has 33% of the RDA in a single cup.

Okay, time for dessert. Let's start with some dark chocolate — another food with substantial magnesium, along with beneficial fats and antioxidants.

Strawberries make a delicious pairing with chocolate. Also, did you know a cup of strawberries has more than 100% of your RDA for vitamin C?

We end our nutrition journey with the lowly bean — a food with an undistinguished reputation. Yet beans are some of the most nutritionally dense foods for humans. Just make sure to eat them with some starch or meat, as well as some fat, to get their full benefit.