A recipe for old-age brain power

A recipe for old-age brain power

Blueberries and spinach sound like a gastronomic recipe for indigestion but according to researchers at the University of South Florida they should be on the menu of every one who hopes to keep mentally strong into old age.

Paula Bickford and her colleagues have been studying the benefits of a diet rich in spinach and other vegetables and fruit for several years. They recently reported at the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference in San Diego that the mental power of learning could be sustained in elderly rats.

Those rodents given a diet containing 2 percent freeze-dried spinach were much quicker at learning motor skill tasks than their cousins fed on everyday rat food.

In a separate study, David Malin of the University of Houston at Clear Lake and colleagues at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico found that blueberries, similarly to spinach, contain large amounts of antioxidants, could also could also maintain memory in rats.

Bickford speculates it's the antioxidants that help inhibit free radicals and so reduce the cumulative effects of life on the aging rat brain. She suggests that the antioxidant inhibition of chemical damage may also be of relevance to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. "The active antioxidant is probably more than one ingredient in the blueberries or spinach," she told RR, "In blueberries the anthocyanin components seem to be very active and in spinach the carotenoids, such as lutein and beta-carotene, get a lot of attention, however I think that it is likely to be a synergy of many different components of the foods that are beneficial and trying to break them into one active ingredient probably will not work."