Healthy Brain, Brain Exercises, And Food For The Brain

Maybe the headline is extremely exaggerated, however, studies show that we with the right mix of nutritions and exercises will be able to maintain a healthy brain and a healthy body for a very long time – like the 82 years old runner Earl Fee mentioned here in this article.

Some recent studies with mice shows that the right ingredients i the food help the mice to develop improved memory. The mice were fed with a mix of vitamins, ginseng, and garlic and not only did the mice improve their memory they also lived longer.

It might be possible to cure aging, say scientists who’ve found that lab mice get smarter and more agile as they age when fed a mix of nutritional supplements.

The diet and supplement plan isn’t a conventional “cure.” But the animal results at McMaster University in Hamilton illustrate how investigators aim to slow down the aging process to avoid the physical and mental declines that often come as more candles are added to the birthday cake.

At Prof. David Rollo’s biology laboratory, mice that ate bagel bits soaked in a cocktail of supplements such as B vitamins, vitamin D, ginseng and garlic lived longer than those not taking the special mice chow.

“If you put them on a supplement, they actually learn better as they age,” Rollo said. “They still don’t live much longer but their brain function is remarkable.”

Also this video from 2010 supports the results

Live 100 years ?

Like Rollo, British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey of Cambridge is optimistic about the potential to extend human life span, but he takes a different approach. He’s not trying to eliminate aging but to extend how long people can be fit and healthy.“We know that with simple man-made machines like cars and airplanes, we don’t have a limit,” said de Grey said, who acknowledged that humans are more complicated.

“We can keep these machines going … just by doing sufficiently comprehensive repair and maintenance reasonably often and that is going to be exactly the same for the human body.”

By bringing the molecular and cellular damage that accumulates throughout life under medical control, de Grey suspects that human life spans could be vastly extended.

“If you reach age 26, what is the chance of not reaching 27? The answer is less than one in a thousand. So if you maintain that risk then clearly you [can] live a four-digit lifespan. You will live 1,000 years or more.”

Earl Fee of Mississauga, Ont., has a more modest goal: to live to 120.

Fee was a runner in his youth and then stopped for years. He resumed running at the age of 57 and now competes.

“I am 82 but I don’t feel much different than when I was 32, so that is a very good feeling,” he said.

Earl credited his intense training regime, healthy diet, enjoying a glass or two of red wine before dinner and the fortune of good genes for his vitality.

“Before I ran, I wasn’t as energetic or as vibrant,” he recalled.

Maybe we will still not have the ability to become 1000, but we know for sure that it is possible to live longer with a sharp mind and with reasonably good body functions.
Read the original article, where also the ingredients in the mice mix are listed.

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Omega 3 fatty acids and other nutrients such as vitamins C, D, E, and B, can prevent brain shrinkage and give Better Brain Health in the later years according to the December issue of the journal Neurology.

Researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University found a possible combination between nutrients found in vitamin and Omega 3 rich foods and the brain.

Together, the omega-3s, vitamins, and trans fat levels, as measured by a recently developed blood test, accounted for over 70 percent of the variation in the scores of cognitive tests taken by the study subjects, the researchers reported.

The study, involving 104 people who were 87 years old on average, was a follow-up to research that indicated that taking blood measurements solves the problem that occurs when people, filling out study questionnaires, inaccurately remember what they’ve eaten.

The results show how physicians may be able to help individual patients reach personal dietary goals to help their brain health in their later years, said study author Gene Bowman, an assistant professor of neurology at Oregon Health and Science University.

Still a lot of uncertainty however !

Researchers not involved in the study said the findings show promise for a new avenue of research, as well as confirming current ideas on maintaining a healthy brain with age.

While the study is promising, said Christy Tangney, a nutrition researcher at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, further work is needed for the new biomarkers the researchers measured to be seen as an effective research tool.

What’s needed, said Tangney, is to determine whether these markers correspond with good dietary patterns over the long term, or whether they simply indicate that someone has eaten well over the past few days.

“I think people think that just because they take a biochemical marker, there’s no problem with those,” she said.

While blood markers may overcome the problem of recall on diet surveys, they are not perfect, said Tangney, who wrote an editorial published in the journal with the study.

Tangney said she has sent tubes of her own blood to different labs for tests of nutrient markers and found the results differ enough that a doctor could give different medical advice based on them.

“I think it’s timely in that we have other studies showing a connection between, for example, overweight or obesity and dementia risk,” said Dr. Gary Small, director of the UCLA Longevity Center and co-author of “The Alzheimer’s Prevention Program” (Workman Publishing, 2011). “You can see there is clearly a connection between what we eat and how well we think as we age.”If confirmed, the findings of the study could allow doctors to determine whether patients with low levels of nutrients should add certain foods to their diet to protect against cognitive decline, Small said.

Even if we still see a lot of studies proving that one or another diet is the correct one if you want to have a Healthy Brain for many years and stay mentally fit also in an old age, we still have a lot of unanswered questions. Never the less the different studies still prove that we need to think about what we eat and how much we exercise both physically and mentally.

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