That Granny Smith apple sitting on your desk isn’t there just to provide a fresh pop of colour to the office, it’s actually part of a uber enhancer to your cognitive function disguised as a humble doctor deterrent.
Today we’re talking about fruit in the office, as you might have guessed. I’m not going to base this on thoughts or feelings, but rather some hard evidence from clients that I have worked with over the years. One of which I won’t mention because of an NDA. I rarely mention any clients by name, but these guys are a financial firm forking out of central London.
They swapped their afternoon biscuit run for bowls of berries and oranges and all the nice fruits, and the error that we saw on complex tasks over the next three weeks dropped by almost 10%. Very little else changed in the office, so I feel confident saying fresh fruit had a direct impact on cognitive function.
Glucose and Energy Cycles
To discuss the science of this a little bit, I want to talk about glucose and energy cycles in your brain. Your brain consumes glucose very quickly, so that means if you’re having a quick and naughty snack at your desk like a biscuit and a sugary coffee, you’ll have that spike in glucose, which is followed by a surge in insulin, and that quickly leads to a crash afterwards.
That crash is what causes the foggy feeling in your mind until you get your next hit of glucose. Fruit comes in here as a bit of a superhero because the fibre in fruit slows the absorption of fructose, which is basically glucose.
Outside of my own experience, there was a study at Cambridge University that cited workers snacking on low glycaemic fruit overall had steadier, more consistent cognitive function compared to another group that stayed the same, generally consuming higher glycaemic snacks. This group had almost 50% more attention lapses in the afternoon due to that fog feeling.
Vitamin C and Brain Function
Outside of the impact of sugar on our bodies, I want to talk about vitamin C and the massive role that it plays in our brain function. It helps us make neurotransmitters, which is what drives your attention span and your alertness.
Another study from the Journal of Nutritional Neuroscience confirmed that workers that were consuming higher levels of vitamin C were completing tasks around 15% faster and were making more than 25% fewer mistakes, which is pretty huge.
For some context here, to boost your neurotransmitter production a single orange a day is enough to do that.
Flavonoids and the Beautiful Berry Boost
Now we’ll talk about flavonoids and the boost they provide your brain. For this we need the superfood blueberries, which contain anthocyanins that are responsible for crossing the blood brain barrier, which helps to enhance neuron to neuron conversations.
Backing this up with more data, an experiment from the University of Reading ran a blueberry smoothie experiment comparing a placebo group to the smoothie group. The smoothie group had an improvement in their working memory and had on average 12% faster reaction times.
The benefits of this peaked at around two hours after consumption and lasted for up to six hours, so that’s covering a huge amount of your workday.
Hydration from Fruit > Your Water Bottle
Your office fruit is also an excellent source of hydration, with some of the overachievers in this group being watermelon, obviously with 92% water, but apples and oranges both clock in at over 85% water too.
The benefit to getting your hydration through fruit is the combination of the fibre, electrolytes, sugar and other nutrients you’re getting from the fruit at the same time as your water. This helps control the rate at which you absorb it, basically slowing it down so it doesn’t pass right through you.
It’s well documented that even mild dehydration has a significant impact on your working memory. The alarming thing here is that most people don’t realize they’re in a state of mild dehydration. You might not even have a headache or any major indicator that you’re in this zone.
My Final (and Best) Case Study Results
Another case study of my personal experience was from an AI tech startup who rather controversially replaced their vending machines with a daily office fruit delivery, and over the next three months clocked some tangible results.
Code commits were up by almost 20%, bug reports were down by over 30%, and there were generally better meeting efficiency scores (an internal anonymous questionnaire), especially in the afternoons. Staff generally gauged their own performances as more alert and less irritable. Their CEO confirmed that for all the work we did with them, introducing office fruit was one of the biggest long term boosts to the team.
Founder of PTPART. 30 years’ experience in high-pressure corporate settings. MSc in Mindfulness at the University of Aberdeen
