Nutrition: Food to beat dementia

Times Online
Amanda Ursell
Q: With so much in the news these days about memory loss and dementia, I wonder if any foods might help to stave off declining memory?

A: A sure-fire preventative measure or cure for memory loss is likely to come only through medical advances that identify causes and ultimately develop drugs to help. In the meantime, it is understandable that we should want to know if there is anything that we can do to hang on to our memory for as long as possible.

Some interesting pointers have come to light over the past few years, including the idea that restricting calorie intake may be beneficial. It seems that lowering our calorie intake by a third, mostly through reducing portion sizes, may improve the outcome of memory tests.

This could be because weight loss lowers insulin levels, which potentially leads to less memory-damaging insulin inflammation in the brain. This doesn't mean that everyone should start dieting like crazy to squeeze into size zero jeans. While high body mass indices do lead to poorer results in so-called Mini-Mental State Examination (which, while not diagnostic, is the most commonly used instrument for screening cognitive function and involves a ten-minute test involving recall, orientation, attention and calculation), so too has being under weight. Perhaps not surprisingly then, a happy medium, with your weight....read the whole article

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