Food For Thought

By John Elson

TITLE: BRAINFOOD

AUTHOR: JEAN-MARIE BOURRE, M.D.

PUBLISHER: LITTLE, BROWN; 268 PAGES; $22.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: A French scientist enlivens a dense treatise on nutrition with some tasteful reflections on gastronomy.

It was, inevitably, a Frenchman who concocted the theory that you are what you eat. (More precisely, wrote the 19th century gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are.") Not surprisingly, another Frenchman has come up with an intriguing corollary: the better you eat, the better you'll think.

One caveat. Despite its chewy theme, Brainfood is in many respects user- hostile. The author is director of research at the National Institute for Medical Research in Paris; his chapters on nutritional basics bristle with such forbidding terms as neuropeptides, mitochondria and oligodendrocyte. Nonetheless, those who can surmount this barbed-wire fence of technical jargon may find other parts of Bourre's book no less pleasing than -- to cite one of his own examples -- an omelet with freshly picked Bordeaux cepe mushrooms.

Despite its miraculous and still mysterious powers, Bourre argues, the human brain is like any other bodily organ: it requires both exercise and proper sustenance -- principally glucose and a suitable supply of amino acids -- to function properly. A healthy brain needs a varied diet, and a varied diet implies cuisine. By this train of logic Bourre reaches the quintessentially Gallic conclusion that "gastronomy is not a luxury but a necessity."

Rather like subtitled dialogue in talky French movies, some of Bourre's sentences probably read better in the original. "The mouth," he notes at one point, "acts as a trial laboratory as well as a processing plant, and it's also an artist at work." The author, though, has a splendid eye for culinary trivia. In the Germanic dukedom of Saxony, noblemen who illicitly married commoners were punished by being force-fed pepper until they died. The builders of Egypt's pyramids were paid off in onions. The Roman scholar Pliny was startled by the high retail prices of the Eternal City -- "Have times really changed?" the author asks -- and believed that the odor of garlic would repel scorpions.

Not every gourmet will be thrilled by Bourre's contention that the best food for brains is, well, brains. Liver, kidneys and sweetbreads are also rich in mind-building and protein-developing fatty acids, as are Rocky Mountain oysters (a.k.a. bull testicles) -- "for enlightened connoisseurs," the author smoothly adds. But one puzzle Bourre leaves unsolved: If eating well equates with thinking well, how come chefs and restaurant critics aren't the smartest folks around?