Want to maintain your cognitive performance as you age? Consume large salads, eat plenty of fruit and occasionally, fruit juice. Scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health found older males that took in high amounts of veggies, fruits and fruit juice had significantly lower odds of scoring “modest” or “poor” on a cognitive function examination later in life, according to findings recently released in Neurology.
Researchers collected everyday food consumption of 27,842 males (mean age in 1986, 51 years) every 4 years between 1986 and 2002. Participants averaged 3.5 servings of vegetables, 1.7 servings of fruit as well as 0.8 servings of fruit juice daily throughout the durations researched. Yuan and associates used sets of questions to examine participants’ subjective cognitive function in 2008 and 2012.
Researchers found the more vegetables, fruit and also fruit juice a participant took in, the less likely he scored modest (OR = 0.83; 95% CI, 0.76-0.92) or poor (OR = 0.66; 95% CI, 0.55-0.8) on the cognition test.
The research compared diets of 28,000 men over 20 years against examinations that measured thinking, reasoning, and also memory abilities. The environment-friendly brain boost might be thanks to antioxidant compounds that safeguard versus oxidative stress and anxiety, which can cause neurological disorders. A cup of raw vegetables is considered a serving, so don’t cut out the salad at dinner!
Yuan C, et al. Neurology, 2018;doi:10.1212/WNL.0000000000006684.
