Eating a diet that contains plenty of spinach and blueberries may help to prevent age-related declines in mental performance, suggest results of two recent studies. Researchers at the University of South Florida found that rats fed a spinach-rich diet learned to associate a sound with an oncoming puff of air significantly faster than those fed a normal diet. Meanwhile another separate study found that elderly rats fed on a blueberry-supplemented diet for four-months performed as well as younger rats in object recognition tests. Learning to associate two different but related events and object recognition are both skills that are known to decline with age in both rodent and humans Both spinach and blueberries contain high-levels of antioxidants. Recent studies have linked the lifelong accumulation of free radicals in the brain with age-related mental decline. Free radicals have also been implicated in the pathology of both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
SOURCE/REFERENCE: Reported by www.ap.org on the 12th November 2001
