Eating vegetables helps slow memory loss in elderly
[ 2006-11-01 10:00 ]
| New research from the Rush University Medical Center in
Chicago indicates your mother was right: eating vegetables is good for
you. Epidemiologist Martha Clare Morris found that eating vegetables every
day seems to slow mental decline and the development of Alzheimer's
disease in old age.
Morris has been looking at the eating habits of thousands of elderly
Chicago residents for more than a decade. "Every 3 years we go into their
homes and ask them all sorts of questions about their health and
lifestyle," she explains. "But also, we administer tests that measure
their thinking ability. So that we can look at changes in their thinking
ability over time."
Morris had people record the kinds of fruits and vegetables they ate
and how often. She found that people who ate more servings of vegetables
per day had memories that deteriorated more slowly than those who didn't
eat vegetables. "People who consumed two to three vegetable servings per
day had a 40 percent reduction in the rate of their decline in their
thinking ability, compared to people who consumed around one or no
servings of vegetables a day." Eating fruits didn't do as much to preserve
thinking ability as eating vegetables.
Morris found that some kinds of vegetables are better than others at
preventing memory loss. She asked study participants about green leafy
vegetables, yellow vegetables, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and
legumes, or beans. "The more
green leafy vegetables they consumed, the slower their rate of decline in
thinking ability," she reports. "We also found evidence of association
with the other types of vegetables, except for legumes. But the relation
was not as strong as for green leafy vegetables." Morris believes the
benefit was derived from those vegetables with especially high levels of
vitamin E.
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