9.
Food FIXES for Brain Power
Food can improve your memory, sharpen your mind, and keep
your brain firing for life.
We’ve all done it at some time or another. You can’t remember where you
parked the car or the last of the four things you needed at the store or the
command that undoes what you just did on your computer. You blank on the
name of your friend’s husband. You space on the day of the week and plenty of
other stuff that should be easy to recall. (Garlic! That’s the fourth item!)
Don’t panic: It’s a natural part of ageing. Your memory declines just like your
eyesight, muscle tone, and bone density does, often in ways that don’t seem to
make sense. Why in the world can you recall the name of your third-grade
teacher but space about whether you unplugged the curling iron three minutes
ago now that you’re out the door? Again, we all experience slight overall brain
drain as we get older; your IQ drops five points per decade after the age of thirty.
Here’s a fact that may surprise you: Memory loss starts at age sixteen (and you
thought it was Snapchat that made your teenager’s mind mush). The decline is so
minimal that you don’t even recognize it, but by age forty, you might start to
notice the effects.
We can’t entirely brush off these quick “senior moments.” Many of us take a
second to pause and think something along the lines of, “I hope it doesn’t get
much worse.” That’s because we harbour a deep fear of memory loss; in fact,
several surveys, including one of my own, have shown that this scares people
more than cancer, heart attacks, and accidents. Maybe you’re afraid because
you’ve watched loved ones struggle through Alzheimer’s or dementia, or you’ve