Veggies food for thought for women, research says

Here’s another reason to eat your veggies: A new study suggests certain vegetables such as broccoli and spinach may help older women keep their brains sharper.

Researchers found that women in their 60s who ate more cruciferous and green leafy vegetables than other women went on to show less overall decline over time on a bundle of tests measuring memory, verbal ability and attention.

Such foods include broccoli, cauliflower, romaine lettuce and spinach.

The federally funded study didn’t include men, but the effect would probably appear in them too, said Jae Hee Kang, an instructor at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

She presented the work Monday in Philadelphia at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders.

Kang stressed that her findings need to be confirmed by further studies.

She and colleagues looked at 13,388 nurses participating in a long-running health study. They compared the participants’ questionnaires on long-term eating habits over a span of 10 years, when they were in their 60s, to their performance in two test sessions when they were in their 70s. Researchers noted how much the scores declined in the two years between sessions.

While most women in the study showed some decline, those who had habitually eaten the most of the green leafy vegetables showed less decline than those who ate the least, Kang said.

“It was almost like they were younger by one or two years in terms of their cognitive declining,” Kang said.

The contrasts appeared between those who ate about eight servings vs. three servings of green leafy vegetables a week, and those who ate about five servings vs. two servings of cruciferous vegetables a week.

One of the other new studies found evidence that obesity, high cholesterol and high blood pressure in middle age each added substantially to the risk of developing Alzheimer’s or other dementia later on. Each problem roughly doubled the risk, and study participants with all three traits ran six times the risk of somebody without any of them, said researcher Dr. Miia Kivipelto of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.