Put another way: Healthy older adults who ate their veggies every day had the thinking ability of someone five years younger.
"The older you were, the better vegetables seem to be in preserving or retaining your memory," lead study author Martha Clare Morris told the New York Daily News. While fruit is definitely good for us, it doesn't have the same protective punch on memory as vegetables, a finding that surprised the researchers.
The magic ingredient is vitamin E, and leafy green veggies are loaded with it. Vitamin E is best absorbed by the body when eaten with healthy fat, such as vegetable oil, something we typically do when we eat a salad. "People who consume the healthy fats, vegetable oils and vegetable fats, also have lower decline in thinking ability and lower risk of Alzheimer's disease," Morris told the Daily News.
The study: For six years, the Rush team followed 3,718 men and women, all of whom were 65 and older. Sixty percent of the volunteers were black. Participants completed a food frequency questionnaire and received at least two cognitive tests over a six-year period.
The results: Those who ate lots of vegetables scored better on memory tests. As they aged, the participants in general did gradually worse on these tests over time, but those who ate more than two vegetable servings a day had about 40 percent less mental decline than those who ate few or no vegetables, reports The Associated Press.
"Compared to people who consumed less than one serving of vegetables a day, people who ate at least 2.8 servings of vegetables a day saw their rate of cognitive change slow by roughly 40 percent," Morris said in a news release announcing the findings. "This decrease is equivalent to about 5 years of younger age."
The study findings were published in the journal Neurology, 2006, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
--From the Editors at Netscape
