Maintaining a nutritious diet is about more than healthy physical development and fighting sickness - the foods we choose to consume regularly also play a large role in our everyday mental stimulation, cognitive abilities, and overall focus and energy when it comes to learning, retaining new information, and completing the seemingly endless tasks before us. Much more effective than turning to the nearest energy drink in times of need is integrating more brain foods into our daily intake.

Nutritional enemies of energy

• Pre-packaged items, while they seem to be time-savers, in the end ultimately drain us of the energy we need to make the most productive use of the time we've saved anyway.

• Corn syrup, which contains an excessive volume of sugars that our bodies absorb more quickly than they can make use of it, overwhelms the system that our brains use to convert sugar into energy. Since foods that most often rely on corn syrup for sweetening are processed foods that are considered unhealthy anyway, avoiding processed foods altogether presents a sound method of avoiding corn syrup in our diets.

• Too much salt and saturated fat can be detrimental to mental performance and concentration. One study concluded that students whose daily diets contained more fruits and vegetables than those of students with diets mainly composed of salt and saturated fat proved less likely to fail the literacy tests they were administered.

• Artificial food colorings have been shown to aggravate symptoms of ADD and ADHD. In fact, studies have even demonstrated a decrease in behavioral problems and increase in learning and retention after artificial colors, among other artificial ingredients, were decreased in students' diets. Since the foods that use artificial coloring are junk foods without little (if any) nutritional value anyway, we can generally consider it best to stay away from the group altogether to begin with.

• When eating for energy, it is also important to be aware of elements that could lead to iron deficiency, such as medicines intended to aid in digestion, which reduces the stomach's iron absorption. Diets high in fiber and sugar also interfere with the body's iron absorption.