An apple a day may keep the doctor away, now new research is showing that it may protect against age-related memory loss as well. In a three-year study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Columbia and Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard found that participants whose diet was high in flavanols had better short-term memory than those who didn’t.
The study included more than 3,500 people who were mostly white and around 71 years old. Participants were randomly assigned a daily supplement in pill form containing the recommended amount of 500 mg of flavanols, or a placebo pill. Participants completed a survey about the quality of their diets at the beginning of the study and then performed online activities at home to evaluate the short-term memory controlled by the hippocampus part of the brain. The tests were repeated each year and more than a third of participants also supplied urine samples so that researchers could measure dietary flavanol levels.
