Eating Less Boosts the Brain and Helps Remember More

by Rajan for The Health Age:An Italian study claims that eating less could help you to remember more. The study says that missing dessert and taking after-dinner coffee instead could also be good for your brain plus waistline. The idea of near-starvation food improves health and extends life.The phenomenon of near-starvation has long been known, but researchers have struggled to find what exactly is about cutting calories. A team led by Dr Giovambattista Pani from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome, decided to focus on aprotein known as CREB1 that is known to be significant to memoryand learning. They carried out an experiment on mice.They found that cutting calories improved learning if the rodents could still make CREB1 protein. The study also showed that cutting calories improved the amount of protein generated in the brain. The amount of calories count in the rodents was cut by twenty to thirty percent. In human beings, this equals to about six hundred calories a day.According to Dr Pani, the study findings identify for the first time a significant mediator of the effects of diet on the brain. This discovery has significant insinuations to develop future therapies to keep brain young and prevent brain degeneration and the ageing process.They hope to find a way to activate CREB1, through new drugs, in order to keep the brain young without the need of a strict diet. This gives a better tool to investigate the brain circuitry and try to make out more drugs that do the same. Now, they are trying a couple of compoundsin animal studies on a preliminary stage.The study findings were reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Similarly, a cup of tea or coffee may also be beneficial, as studies crediting caffeine to boosting the amount of CREB1 made in the body. Maintaining the brain young could be ofgigantic value in an ageing population.Source: http://bit.ly/zGJ9KV