What Our Grandmothers Fed Us: Ancestral Foods, Choline, and the Science of Brain Nourishment

Ancestral Wisdom · Science Meets Spirit

In 2024, researchers at the University of Queensland identified the protein FLVCR2 as the transporter that carries choline across the blood-brain barrier — the selective gateway that protects the brain from the bloodstream while allowing essential nutrients through. This discovery has implications for treating neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and stroke, by showing scientists how to design drugs that can reach the brain the way choline naturally does.

The African grandmother who fed her family eggs from free-ranging chickens, dark leafy greens cooked in red palm oil, freshly prepared legumes, and seeds ground into thick sauces did not know about FLVCR2. She knew something else: that these foods built sharp minds, strong memory, and healthy children. She was right. Science is catching up to her.

What Choline Does in the Brain

Choline is an essential nutrient — one the body cannot produce in sufficient quantities on its own and must obtain through food. In the brain, it is foundational. Choline is the precursor to acetylcholine, one of the brain’s primary neurotransmitters, responsible for memory formation, nerve-to-muscle signaling, and attention. It contributes to the structural integrity of cell membranes throughout the brain, keeping neurons strong and responsive. And it is particularly critical during pregnancy: adequate choline during fetal development shapes brain architecture in ways that affect cognition and memory across the child’s entire life. Most choline should come through diet, according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

The FLVCR2 discovery — led by Dr. Rosemary Cater and her team at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience — revealed that FLVCR2 is expressed in the blood-brain barrier of both mice and humans, acting as a selective transporter that allows choline to pass where other substances cannot. This discovery matters not just for understanding nutrition but for unlocking new ways to deliver therapeutic drugs directly to the brain for conditions like Alzheimer’s, stroke, and other neurological disorders.

But this is the science naming what the food already does. And African ancestral food traditions have been doing it for generations. Epigenetics teaches us that what our ancestors ate shaped our gene expression — and that the nourishment choices made generations ago are still alive in our biology today.

African Ancestral Foods as Choline Medicine

Choline-rich foods are not exotic or expensive. They are, in many cases, the everyday foods of African ancestral diets:

Eggs — the richest dietary source of choline — have been central to African food traditions across the continent. In West African cooking, eggs appear in stews, pepper soups, and morning preparations. In East Africa, eggs from free-ranging village chickens were a regular protein source. The yolk, which Western diet culture spent decades demonizing, is where virtually all the choline lives.

Dark leafy greens — sukuma wiki (collard greens) in East Africa, gbure (waterleaf) in West Africa, moringa, amaranth leaves, cassava leaves — are all meaningful sources of choline and the vitamins and minerals that support its use. These greens were not side dishes. They were medicine, prepared daily and understood by those who grew them as essential to health.

Legumes — black-eyed peas, groundnuts, cowpeas, lentils, and beans prepared in countless variations across African cuisines — provide choline alongside the protein, fiber, and complex carbohydrates that support brain function over the long term. The groundnut soups and bean stews of West Africa, the lentil dishes of East Africa, the bean preparations of Southern Africa: all choline-delivering, all ancestral.

Organ meats — beef liver, kidney, heart — are among the highest choline sources known, and were central to African food traditions that understood no part of an animal as waste. Organ meat preparations appear across the continent, recognized not as poor food but as the most nourishing parts of the animal.

Seeds and nuts — sesame, pumpkin seeds, groundnuts — round out the ancestral choline picture. These were ground into sauces, pressed into oils, and eaten daily in forms that made their nutrients bioavailable.

The Brain as Ancestral Inheritance

Choline’s role in prenatal brain development makes it, in the deepest sense, an ancestral gift. Research confirms that maternal choline intake during pregnancy shapes the child’s cognitive architecture — their capacity for memory, attention, and learning. The African grandmother who nourished a pregnant woman with eggs, leafy greens, and legumes was not just feeding a body. She was building a brain. She was making a contribution to a child she might never meet.

This is what the body keeps from the ancestors: the nutritional wisdom that was encoded in food culture before it was measured in laboratories. The disruption of these food traditions — through enslavement, forced migration, the industrialization of food systems, and the replacement of ancestral diets with processed alternatives — is a nutritional and neurological loss whose full consequences are still being traced.

The Community Table as the Delivery System

In ancestral African food traditions, meals were rarely solitary. Food was prepared collectively, shared communally, and served with the social architecture of relationship — elders first, children tended to, no one eating alone if the community could help it. The science of belonging confirms what this practice embedded: that eating together regulates the nervous system, deepens social bonds, and creates the conditions of safety in which the body can fully absorb and use what it receives.

The community table is not incidental to nutrition. It is part of the medicine. Choline absorbed in isolation does not carry the same power as choline received in the presence of people who love you, around food that carries ancestral memory, prepared with the knowledge of generations. Nourishment is not only biochemical. It is relational. —MM

References

Nature: FLVCR2 as a Choline Transporter at the Blood-Brain Barrier

PMC: Choline and Brain Development

Verywell Health: Choline — What It Is and Why You Need It

Science Daily: Choline and Prenatal Brain Development

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