The Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University reported that a lack of iron in children’s diets has been linked to poor academic performance and cognition, according to the school's website.

Now, new research from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is providing even more evidence to the belief that a lack of iron in one’s youth can have a negative impact on cognitive development.

To arrive at this conclusion, researchers measured the levels of transferrin, a protein that transports iron throughout the body and brain, in 615 young adult twins and siblings. Then, eight to twelve years later, the researchers collected these subjects’ magnetic resonance imagining scans when they were in their early twenties and considered to be healthy.

"We found that healthy brain wiring in adults depended on having good iron levels in your teenage years," said Paul Thompson of UCLA. "This connection was a lot stronger than we expected, especially as we were looking at people who were young and healthy - none of them would be considered iron-deficient."

Based on these findings, parents who are concerned about their children’s eating habits may want to have them take a kids IQ test to get a sense of how they are developing mentally. If more iron is needed in their diet, the mineral can be found in such foods as beef, chicken, tuna, potatoes and raisins.

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