By It’s easy, simple and delicious to eat as a snack
It’s only natural to forget things, but sometimes as we age, that can become a regular occurrence which is quite annoying at the best of times. As you may already know, diet plays an essential part in our cognitive outcomes, and doing as much as possible to nurture our health through nutrition from the ages of 20 and beyond is necessary. No matter what age you might be reading this, it’s never too late to start taking the right action and giving your brain the much-needed health boost it requires. Adding certain fruits and vegetables that provide the added benefits of memory-enhancing polyphenols is one of the best ways to begin the process. Learning and experimenting with these food sources will naturally become a habit. A study from Frontiers in nutrition indicates that polyphenol supplementation is very effective for our brain health. Participants in the study had 60 healthy men and women aged between 50 and 80. Half of these participants were given freeze-dried cranberry powder, equating to a small cup of cranberries. The control group were given a placebo. After the 12-week-long trial, researchers wanted to see just how much leverage cranberry supplementation had on cognitive, brain function and neuronal signalling biomarkers. Compared to the control group, those who took the cranberry supplement increased their visual episodic memory — remembering fine details of what something looks like. Episodic memory is also the part of memory that details what happened within events early on in your life, such as birthdays, your first kiss and so forth. Again, cranberries play a role in enhancing and sustaining memory in those later years. One aspect of memory enhancement could be the increased blood flow to the entorhinal cortex — as this is the gateway for information entering the hippocampus. Learning and memory occur here. Cranberry supplementation also has the added benefit of decreasing LDL — bad cholesterol. That decrease also supports vascular health support and slowly improves blood flow and cognitive performance.
Takeaways
As you can see, polyphenols are essential in your diet, and some added supplementation doesn’t harm you either. It’s one of the most effective ways to improve memory and cognitive function. I’m not opposed to supplementation, but the best way to increase your brain health and functioning is to do so with food and get your doctor’s advice before supplementing. You may not even need it after all. Do you indulge in freeze-dried fruit, and why?
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