People diet for many reasons - to fit into clothes, to look more attractive, or for the sake of their health. But to improve their memory? It's an interesting idea, and one that's been given fresh support by Veronica Witte and colleagues from the University of Munster in Germany.
Witte found that elderly people who slash the calories in their diet by 30% were better able to remember lists of words than people who stuck to their normal routine. It's the first experiment to show that cutting calories can improve human memory at an age when declining memory is par for the course.
The benefits of low-calorie diets have been extensively studied in animals, ever since Clive McCay discovered that "caloric restriction" doubled the lifespan of rats, over 70 years ago. Many studies have found that such diets could help to slow the brain's eventual decline and protect its neurons ...
