Koibito Poke is all about real. With every visit, guests can expect a real experience — from genuine and helpful customer service to an impeccably clean environment and most importantly, to a clean meal created fresh on the spot with real ingredients. The emphasis on real is not one Koibito Poke takes lightly. They want their customers to enjoy real food for their own health — body and brain. With that in mind, Koibito Poke talks nutrition — and the best real food to properly fuel both body and brain.
In an article titled “Nutritional psychiatry: Your brain on food” on the Harvard Health website, Eva Selhub, MD explains that the brain is constantly “on,” which means it constantly requires a supply of “fuel.”
“That ‘fuel’ comes from the foods you eat — and what’s in the fuel makes all the difference,” she writes. “Put simply, what you eat directly affects the structure and function of your brain and, ultimately, your mood.”
High-quality foods that contain a plethora of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants help feed the brain and even protects it from oxidative stress — “the ‘waste’ (free radicals) produced when the body uses oxygen, which can damage cells.”
In addition to the brain, the body is impacted by the right (and the wrong!) foods. Serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates sleep and appetite, mediate moods and inhibit pain, is mostly (95 percent) produced in the gastrointestinal tract. Lined with a “hundred million nerve cells,” the inner workings of the digestive system can help guide emotions in addition to helping the body digest food. Further, good bacteria in the intestinal microbiome help protect the lining of the intestines and form a barrier against toxins and bad bacteria, limit inflammation, improve absorption of nutrients from food and “activate neural pathways that travel direction between the gut and the brain.”
So what are these key high-quality foods that people should be focusing on in a healthy diet? Taking cues from traditional Mediterranean and Japanese diets, people should focus on eating lots of vegetables, fruits, fish and seafood and unprocessed grains. It’s also key to limit processed foods and refined foods and sugars.
A poke bowl from Koibito Poke is a complete source of these foods listed above that serve the body and the brain — in a real way. To get the most out of every meal, focus on real foods that can help heal body and mind from within… and ones that taste good too!
