How to build a healthy brain
August 8th 2010 21:25
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Stimulate your mind with regular exercise, by eating fish, blueberries and nuts
Everything from figuring out a new route to work to learning a tricky new tango step has been touted as a good way to stimulate the brain. If you could do one of those while eating blueberries and salmon, you might make your brain really happy.
While it's pretty much accepted that our brains, just like our bodies, do not necessarily shut down with age and that it's possible to build brain cells just as we can develop muscle strength, we have to regularly exercise the older brain and feed it well.
Acknowledging that both physical and mental exercise appear to help prevent loss of mental abilities, Dr. Dale Bredesen, professor and researcher in Alzheimer's disease at the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, said, “It is good for all of us to do mental exercises, be they involving memory, reasoning or speed. These improve our performance on mental tasks that otherwise begins to decay as we age.”
Mental exercises can include everything from mastering some new high-tech device to studying Japanese to figuring out word puzzles. As to whether exercise, physical or mental, can go so far as to help prevent or slow the shutdown of the brain in Alzheimer's disease, Bredesen said the jury is still out.
“Studies are divided on whether people who have already been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease actually show improved memory following memory exercises,” Bredesen said. “The best we can say right now is that such exercises won't hurt.”
For the average aging brain that experiences occasional fuzziness, stimulation is definitely key.
“The best time to start pushing the brain is prior to any symptoms of Alzheimer's,” Bredesen said.
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