Thinking About Brain Food or, Eat to Beat Cognitive Decline

A healthful diet feeds a healthy brain and supports clear thinking. No surprise there, but in the nutrition world, the brand-new buzz word is timing. As Science Daily reported last week, the American Society for Nutrition wants you to know that to feed their brain and stay sharp as you age, when you eat may be as important as what you eat, especially for older folks whose cognitive abilities naturally decline as they age. Call it brain food for rockers and other machers.

The possible proof for this particular pudding comes from a small 6-month clinical trial at Rutgers University and RWJ Medical Center in which overweight women agreed to follow a calorie-restricted diet and some were agreed to eat only during an 8-hour window each day.

First up, the researchers recognized that Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia are becoming more common, and that both men and women who are overweight tend to be at greater risk. According to study leader Sue Shapses, ”Losing weight alone will ward off some of the aging-related cognitive decline.” but she and her Rutgers cohorts wanted to find out if other stratagems, such as limiting dining to fewer hours a day might also be beneficial. That’s a subject which has intrigued researchers for several years, but the Rutgers trial is unusual in being among the first to directly address the question.

The trial subjects included 47 overweight women ages 50 to 79 whose daily calorie intake was cut down to a seriously skimpy 500. Slightly more than half the women (26 in total) were directed to consume those few calories within a period of less than nine hours a day, generally between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. The rest were permitted to continue their eating across the normal daily 12 daylight hours.

At the end of the trial, when Shapses and company toted up the stats, they found two classes of marked differences in brainpower between the two subject groups. While the women in both groups each lost about 15 pounds, a totally normal result on their low-calorie regimes, the ladies who limited their hours at table scored significantly higher than their fellow subjects who continued eating across 12 hours on psych tests measuring spatial planning and the ability to solve problems, i.e., the basic brain power: thinking.

As the Science Daily summary reports , when Shapses presented her study results at July’s annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition in National Harbor, Maryland, she had a 2-point message. Number One: “Losing weight alone will ward off some of the aging-related cognitive decline.” Number Two, while it remains to be conclusively proven, her study’s data suggest that “there may be additional benefits if you stop eating 4 hours prior to going to sleep and reduce food intake to 8-9 hours per day, compared to the usual eating window of 12 hours per day.”

In short, as presently posited one path to staying sharp as you age may be by-passing up bedtime snacks and midnight raids on the fridge. Alas!