Royane Real
Keeping Your Brain Healthy While You Age: Five Tips to Help You Stay Sharp
By : Jamie Jefferson
Introductory comments by Royane Real
Author of: “How You Can Be Smarter - Use Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better and Be More Creative”
The following article by Jamie Jefferson will give you some ideas of what you should do if you want to keep your brain healthy as you age. Some of the information provided by Jamie in this article is about what lifestyle you should follow as you get older if you want to keep your brain intact.
The article also mentions some of the foods and supplements you should eat that may help you maintain a healthy brain with good reasoning power and a sharp memory as you grow older.
If you’ve already read a few articles about what you should eat in order to keep your brain sharp and functioning properly as you age, you will notice that sometimes a particular article recommends one supplement, while another article will recommend a different vitamin or supplement.
Why does this happen? Why don’t all the articles about maintaining the health of your brain recommend all the same supplements?
The reason is that there are a lot of supplements that seem to help the brain a little bit. None of them seem to be the one magic bullet that will stop aging and prevent brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. It is quite possible that if you try to implement several of the strategies at the same time, you may have better luck in preserving your brain power than if you decide to only try one strategy and ignore the rest.
That is why it is useful to read a lot of different articles and books so that you can become better informed if you want to reach old age with your brain function intact.
Scientists are rushing to discover what factors seem to help maintain a healthy brain, and what factors make the brain deteriorate prematurely. They are studying the effects of many lifestyle factors, including foods and supplements to see which ones can actually help the brain.
Many of the studies that show a particular supplement may help the brain were done on aging rats. Sometimes the studies were done on cells in a test tube.
Sometimes the researchers simply looked at the lifestyles of various people over various periods of time. For example, one study might give a group of people a supplement for a few months and try to discover whether or not it made a difference.
Other studies have been done in a different way.
Scientists tried to keep track of large groups of people and watch their lifestyles over a very long period of time.
They tried to discover which supplements and which foods were used by people who managed to grow old with their brains still sharp. Then they compared the lifestyles of mentally sharp older people with the lifestyles followed by those who started to develop memory loss as they grew older.
If the topic of maintaining your brain power as you get older is something you are interested in, there is a lot of information on this website that can help you find out what to do to keep mentally sharp.
(The above introductory comments were written by Royane Real who is the author of the book “How You Can Be Smarter - Use Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better and Be More Creative” Download it today and learn more ways to get the maximum use of your brainpower. It’s available at http://www.lulu.com/real )
Feature article
Keeping Your Brain Healthy While You Age: Five Tips to Help You Stay Sharp
By : Jamie Jefferson
Recent scientific discoveries have shown that the body is not the only thing that ages as we grow old.
Your brain can also experience the effects of aging, especially if you don't take steps to keep it healthy. The following five suggestions will help you stay sharp.
1. Eating for Brain Health.
Your brain relies on the foods that you eat, as well as the rest that you get, in order to work properly. It's important to eat a well-balanced diet. Eating foods considered to be "brain healthy" will help keep your body and your brain working at optimum levels.
These foods include vegetables, foods high in antioxidants (such as blueberries, raisins, red bell peppers and eggplant), omega-3 fatty acids (mostly found in cold water fish) and B vitamins.
Recent research has also indicated the importance of two other brain nutrients: alpha-lipoic acid and acetyl l-carnitine. Talk to your doctor about taking supplements of these nutrients to help keep your brain young.
Both of these supplements increase the energy output of the mitochondria, a part of your cells that produce the energy that runs your entire body. Over time, mitochondria start to disintegrate and taking a supplement may help to prevent or slow this process.
New research is coming out all the time on the effects of various nutritional supplements on brain health, so stay alert to new developments in this exciting branch of modern science.
2. Physical Exercise.
Your brain also loves physical exercise. Exercise brings more oxygen into your body, which is great for your brain. Physical activity also helps by producing stress proteins that encourage the regeneration of brain cells.
For best results, according to recent research, you need to be mentally engaged with the exercise activity. If you consider your exercise boring, and you mentally check out during the activity, research suggests that you are not going to get the same benefits as someone who is having fun and is fully engaged during the exercise.
3. Mental Exercise.
Your brain is a muscle and, in order to keep it fit as you age, you need to continue to exercise it as much as possible.
The first way you can do this is through improving and maintaining your reasoning skills. This can be done through puzzles or challenging games, such as chess. Stretch your brain by reading philosophy or engaging in friendly debating with some friends.
Another part of exercising your brain is improving your verbal skills. Word of the Day calendars, crossword puzzles, and games such as Scrabble can also help increase your vocabulary and strengthen your brain.
4. Try something new.
Expand your experience by taking up an instrument or trying to learn a new language. Not only are these hobbies fun, but they can also help to create new connections in your brain. These new connections improve the overall strength of your brain and allow you to learn and remember more over time.
5. R & R.
Finally, your brain functions best when it has had enough rest. Getting enough sleep is important to your mental functioning and also in the storage of memories. When you have good sleep habits, you'll be able to think more clearly and you may even find that you start to remember more than you did before.
Article Source: Articles Matter
Author: - Jamie Jefferson writes for Momscape.com and Susies-Coupons.com, where she shares product reviews including a great natural insomnia cure as well as drugstore.com coupons.
*******************************************************************************************************
Mentally Fit Forever
Boost Your Brain Power
The reality is that you can be sharper as you age, if you start now to care for that most important of all organs, your brain. And even more exciting news—if you are already experiencing memory loss, you can do what hundreds of others have already done—reverse the process!
To get more information visit
http://nightingale.directtrack.com/z/10548/CD1323/
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
