Foods useful for the brain to fight aging
There is extensive scientific literature describing the positive the impact of nutrients from plant foods on overall health and longevity. However, it is only now becoming clear that food consumption mainly of vegetable origin can affect neuroinflammation, inflammation of the brain, which results in the expression of cell-protective cell-protecting cells, and reducing proteins.
Natural Health Source – Get the very BEST in skin care, nutritional supplements, and other herbal health products. Natural Health Source is a collection of exclusive natural supplements that come with exceptionally high satisfaction rates, which typically hover above 95%. And they’re all in one place – right here – giving you the chance to address just about any natural health topic you can imagine..”
It is only in the last decade that remarkable progress has been made in the idea that oxidative stress and chronic inflammation are low are the major risk factors that underlie brain aging, so it’s no wonder that antioxidant and anti-inflammatory foods can help. Some brain healthy foods are useful for anti aging. The brain is particularly vulnerable to free radical attack, oxidative stress, because of its high fat content and high metabolic boiler. You would not want your brain to mush.
So one would think that one of the main fat-soluble antioxidants in food, like beta-carotene, it will interfere, but the main carotenoid is concentrated in the brain it is actually lutein; the brain just prefers it and sucks it out.
For example, if you look at the oldest people, as in the Georgia Centennial Survey, which recognizes that oxidation is associated with a decline in cognitive function with age, they believe that food antioxidants can play an important role in preventing or delaying the process, and therefore looked at eight different antioxidants, Vitamin A, Vitamin E and more only lutein was found to be associated with significantly better cognitive function. Rosemary have many brain health benefits.
Autopsy brain tissue is now being considered in this study. But they are a little late. How we can examine the impact of nutrition on the brain while we are still alive? If only there was a way to physically look a living brain with its own eyes. There is! With your own eyes. The retina, the back of the eyeball, is actually an extension of our central nervous system, an extension of the brain during development, and in the middle there is one point.
This is what the doctor sees when he looks in your eye with this bright light. This place called the macula, is our HD camera where you get the highest resolution vision, and it’s full of lutein. And indeed, the levels in the retina meet the levels in the rest of your brain, so your eyes can be a window to your brain.
So now we can finally do some research on living people, to see if nutrition can affect lutein levels in the eyes, which reflects the levels of lutein in the brain, so let’s see if this is related to improvements in cognitive function.
There are indeed significant relationships between quantity macular pigment, these plant pigments like lutein in the eyes, and the results of cognitive tests. This can be demonstrated by functional magnetic resonance imaging, which suggests that lutein and its associated plant pigment, called zeaxanthin, support cognitive function in the elderly by improving neural efficiency, the effectiveness with which nerves communicate.
Check out this cool white matter integrity study by using something called diffusion tensor imaging, which provides a unique opportunity to look at the connectivity of the brain network, which allows us to trace the neural pathways in the brain. And the researchers have been able to prove an improved integrity of the chain based on how much lutein and zeaxanthin they can see in people’s eyes – further evidence of the important link between nutrition and wholeness of our brain, especially in regions that are susceptible to age-related disorders.
So, do Alzheimer’s patients have less of this macular pigment? Significantly less lutein in the eyes, significantly less lutein in the blood and a higher incidence of macular degeneration, in which this pigment layer is destroyed. The thickness of this plant pigment layer in our eyes can be measured and may be a potential indicator of the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. But let’s not wait that long.
We know that macular pigment density is related to cognitive function in the elderly. What about middle-aged people? One visible consequence of aging seems to be the loss of some aspects of cognitive control that starts early, middle-aged, but not for anyone who suggests there might be something like eating that which could cause some of these differences.
Here is a measure of cognitive control, which shows that young people usually do better than older people. But older people who have high levels of macular pigment, a lot of lutein in the back of your eyes performs significantly better. These results suggest that the protective role of carotenoids like lutein in the brain, can be observed at a young and middle age, decades before a more obvious cognitive decline later in life.
You can take a group of 20s and see an excellent listening and understanding function for those with more macular pigment in the eyes. Look, our hearing aid, our hearing, like the rest from our central nervous system, after all, it works and it is supported by our diet and so it is not surprising, that it is sensitive to nutrition throughout our lives, including during childhood.
Higher levels of macular pigment are associated with greater academic achievement among the students. You can look at the eyes of a child and get an idea of how good it is it deals with subjects like math and writing. This finding is important because macular lutein is variable and can be manipulated through food intake, but where is lutein contained? The avocado and egg industries love to boast about how much macular pigments their products contain, but the real superstars are the dark green leafy vegetables.
Half a glass of kale contains 50 times more lutein than one egg, spinach salad or an omelette with 50 eggs? And the sooner the better. Pregnant and lactating women should definitely check my recommended daily portions of herbs in the Daily Dozen app. But it’s also obviously never too late.
Although some age-related cognitive impairment can be expected, these effects may be less pronounced among people who eat more green, but there is no way of knowing for sure until we have a survey that we will look at in the next video.
As found on Youtube
