New research confirms that eating fish does keep your brain healthy. More important, this research has also uncovered a way to make you smarter when you're eating fish.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences have found this best way is to either bake or broil fish. Doing this every week can help boost your brain health by keeping your brain younger for a longer period of time.

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A new Cardiovascular Health Study noted that fish contain large amounts of Omega-3 fatty acids that have been found to significantly improve brain health. Omega-3 fatty acids are also important for normal metabolism.

Lead investigator Cyrus Raji, M.D., Ph.D. said baked or broiled fish contains higher levels of Omega-3s than fried fish because the fatty acids are destroyed in the high heat of frying, "so we took that into consideration when we examined their brain scans."

The study discovered that people who ate broiled or baked fish at least once a week had more grey matter brain volumes in regions associated with memory and cognition.

People who ate fish regularly were also more likely to have a college education compared to those who didn't eat fish regularly.

"This suggests that lifestyle factors, in this case eating fish, rather than biological factors contribute to structural changes in the brain," said James Becker, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the study's senior investigator.

"A confluence of lifestyle factors likely are responsible for better brain health, and this reserve might prevent or delay cognitive problems that can develop later in life."

"We did not find a relationship between Omega-3 levels and these brain changes, which surprised us a little. It led us to conclude that we were tapping into a more general set of lifestyle factors that were affecting brain health of which diet is just one part."

The latest study took data from 260 people who provided data about their dietary intake and underwent brain scans. Researchers said the participants were all cognitively normal.