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MONDAY, Oct. 23 (HealthDay News) -- Want to preserve your mental edge as you age? Vegetables -- particularly green, leafy ones -- will do the trick if you eat three servings a day, new research shows.
But the research also suggests that the same effect is not found in those who eat lots of fruit.
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"It's a modest effect," said Martha Clare Morris, associate professor at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and lead author of the study. "People who consumed two or more vegetables a day had a 35 to 40 percent decrease in the decline in thinking ability over six years. That's the equivalent of being five years younger in age."
The study results are published in the Oct. 24 issue of the journal Neurology.
Morris' team studied 3,718 research participants 65 or older who live in the south side of Chicago. Sixty-two percent were black, 38 percent were non-Hispanic white, and 62 percent were female.
"We used a complete food questionnaire of 139 different food items," Morris said. "We asked about their usual intake and assessed the frequency of intake." During the six-year study, the participants received at least two cognitive tests that measured their memory and thinking speed.
"By far, the association with a slower rate of decline was found in the group that ate high amounts of green, leafy vegetables," Morris said. Such foods included lettuce and tossed salad, spinach, kale and collards.
The study also found that the slowdown in cognitive decline was greatest in the oldest people who ate at least two more vegetable servings a day.
Because the cognitive tests measured overall thinking ability, the benefits of eating vegetables may translate into an easier time with such everyday tasks as remembering phone numbers and names and balancing checkbooks, Morris said.
Morris suspects that vegetables may help protect memory and thinking speed because they contain high amounts of vitamin E, an antioxidant that can help reduce the damage caused by free radicals, unstable oxygen molecules generated by normal metabolism that can damage neurons in the brain and contribute to dementia.
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