MONDAY, Jan. 26, 2009 (Health.com) — Having a senior moment? A new study suggests that cutting calories may help. Older adults who cut down on the amount of calories they consume get a two-for-one special: weight loss and better memory.
Healthy women ranging in age from 50 to 80 who reduced their calorie intake by 30% for three months not only lost weight, but their scores on verbal memory tests also shot up by 20%, according to a study conducted by Agnes Floel, MD, and her colleagues from the University of Munster in Germany, who published the results in the January 27 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The results seem pretty dramatic,” says Mark P. Mattson, PhD, a senior investigator at the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md. “Even though the number of subjects in the study was not really high, they had really high, statistically significant improvements in their performance on the memory test,” added Mattson, who studies caloric restriction and the brain in his role as chief of the Cellular and Molecular Neurosciences Section at the Laboratory of Neurosciences but was not involved in Dr. Floel’s investigation. (Read The Best Memory Boosters for Women.)
The study included 50 women, all of whom were either normal weight or slightly overweight. Twenty were assigned to the calorie-cutting group, 20 upped their intake of unsaturated fatty acids (which some studies suggest may help aging brains), and the remaining 10 stuck with their normal diet. Unlike the women who cut down on calories, the women who ate more unsaturated fatty acids showed no improvement in their memories; nor did those in the control group.
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