A plant-based diet is thought to have played a significant role in human evolution.

And the consumption of whole plant foods and even just extracts

has repeatedly been associated with a decreased risk of aging related diseases.

And by healthy aging I’m not talking preventing wrinkles.

What about protecting our brain?

Two of the most dreaded consequences of dementia with aging

are problems moving around and difficulty remembering things.

Dementia robs older adults of their independence, control, and identity.

What can we do about it?

Well, fruits and vegetables help reduce the risk of other chronic diseases,

might they work for brain diseases as well?

There has been a proliferation of recent interest

in plant polyphenols as agents in the treatment of dementia.

There are 4,000 different kinds found ubiquitously

in foods of plant origin, but berries are packed with them,

possessing powerful antioxidant, anti-inflammatory properties,

and there’s a subset of a subset called anthocyanidins,

natural blue-purple pigments uniquely and specifically capable

of both crossing the blood–brain barrier

and localizing inside brain regions involved in learning and memory.

And that’s where we need it.

The brain takes up less than like 2% of the body weight,

but may burn up to 50% of the body’s fuel,

creating a potential firestorm of free radicals.

So maybe these brain-seeking phytonutrients in berries

could fight oxidation, inflammation, and increase blood flow.

So, this raised a thought-provoking idea.

Maybe a nutritional intervention with blueberries

may be beneficial in forestalling or even reversing

the neurological changes associated with aging.

So did researchers give blueberries to people and see what happened?

No, as I noted in an earlier video, they gave blueberries to rats.

It would be a decade before the first human trial.

But it worked!

"Blueberry Supplementation Improves Memory in Older Adults"

suggesting that consistent supplementation with blueberries

may offer an approach to forestall or mitigate

brain degeneration with age.

What other blue/purple foods can we try?

Concord grape juice had a similar benefit,

improving verbal learning,

suggesting that supplementation with purple grape juice

may enhance cognitive function in older adults with early memory decline.

Why use juice and not whole concord grapes?

Because then you couldn’t design a placebo

that looked and tasted exactly the same

to rule out the very real and powerful placebo effect.

And also, because it was funded by the Welch’s grape juice company.

This effect was confirmed in a follow-up study ,

showing for the first time an increase in neural activation

in parts of the brain associated with memory using functional MRI scans.

But this brain scan study was tiny, just 4 people in each group.

And same problem in the blueberry study –

it just had 9 people in it.

Why haven’t large population-based studies been done?

Because we haven’t had good databases

on where these phytonutrients are found.

We know how much vitamin C is in a blueberry,

but not how much anthocyanidin, ...until now.

The Harvard Nurse’s Health Study

followed the cognitive function of more than 16,000 women for years,

and found that higher, long-term consumption of berries

was associated with significantly slower rates of cognitive decline

in this cohort of older women,

even after careful consideration of confounding by socioeconomic status,

meaning even after taking into account the fact that rich people eat more berries.

The first population-based evidence that greater intakes

of blueberries and strawberries were highly associated

with slower rates of cognitive decline,

and not just by a little bit.

The magnitude of associations were equivalent

to the cognitive differences that one might observe

in women up to 2 and a half years apart in age.

In other words, women with higher intake of berries

appeared to have delayed cognitive aging by as much as 2 1/2 years.

Why not just take some kind of anthocyanidin supplement?

Because there hasn’t been a single study that found any kind of cognitive benefit

just giving these single phytonutrients. In fact the opposite.

Whole blueberries appear to be more effective than individual components,

showing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

These findings potentially have substantial public health implications,

as increasing berry intake represents a fairly simple dietary modification

to test in older adults for maintaining brain function.