This is your brain on Marmite

In a world bitterly divided into proand anti-Marmite factions, lovers of the tangy British spread have found support from an unexpected quarter: brain science.

Experiments found that volunteers who ate a daily spoonful of the darkbrown yeast extract seemed to have higher levels of a vital neuron chemical associated with a healthy brain.

The reason could lie in Marmite’s high levels of vitamin B12, the investigators say.

In a study published on Wednesday, psychologists at the University of York in northern England recruited 28 volunteers and divided them into two groups.

One group ate a teaspoon of Marmite each day for a month; the other ate a daily teaspoon of peanut butter.

The volunteers wore noninvasive skullcaps fitted with electrodes to monitor brain activity while they looked at a screen with a visual stimulus — a large stripey pattern that flickered at a regular rate.

The Marmite group showed a substantial reduction of about 30% in response to the stimulus compared with the peanut butter group.

The work, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, sheds a powerful light on how diet can affect brain activity, the researchers say.

How Marmite worked was not clinically investigated.

“This study suggests that eating Marmite is potentially good for you in that it seems to increase a chemical messenger associated with healthy brain function,” said lead authors Daniel Baker and Anika Smith.

The pair said they were not clinicians or dieticians, so were unwilling to make any recommendations about what would be a healthy limit for eating Marmite.

“However, there is no evidence that normal consumption of Marmite has any negative effects,” they said.

Compared with the same quantity of peanut butter, the team found that Marmite had about 116 times more vitamin B12, three times more vitamin B6, and nearly twice as much glutamate as peanut butter. — AFP