Leafy Greens may keep your Brain Young

The list of reasons why leafy greens are good for you?

People who ate at least one serving a day of cooked kale, spinach or collards had better preserved memory and thinking skills compared to those who never or rarely ate these vegetables, according to a recent study.

The difference between those who ate leafy greens and didn’t amounted to being 11 years younger in terms of cognition.

“Adding a daily serving of green, leafy vegetables to your diet may be a simple way to foster your brain health,” said study author Martha Clare Morris, a nutritional epidemiologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

The research, published in the journal Neurology, involved 960 people with an average age of 81 and no sign of dementia.

Participants completed a questionnaire about how often they ate certain foods and had their thinking and memory skills tested yearly during that time.

Of the foods involved in the questionnaire, green, leafy vegetables were shown to have significant brain-protective powers.

It’s not clear why these vegetables enhance the brain, but the veggies are rich in a range of nutrients compounds including vitamin E and K, lutein, beta carotene and folate.

"They have different roles and different biological mechanisms to protect the brain," Morris told NPR.

The researcher acknowledged that the study doesn’t prove that eating green, leafy vegetables slows brain aging, it only shows an association. The field of study is an important one.

More than 5.5 million Americans were living with Alzheimer's dementia in 2017.  “Projections show sharp increases in the percentage of people with dementia as the oldest age groups continue to grow in number,” said Morris, “ so effective strategies to prevent dementia are critical.”