`Eating Olive Oil Might Help You Remember Why You Should - Olive Oil Times
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enEnglishfrFrançaiselελληνικάdeDeutscheitItalianozh-CN中文ptPortuguêsesEspañoltrTürkçehrHrvatskija日本語hiहिंदी

Eating Olive Oil Might Help You Remember Why You Should

By Elena Paravantes
May. 21, 2012 08:51 UTC

According to a new study pub­lished in the Annals of Neurology, monoun­sat­u­rated fats, the ​“good” fats found in high amounts in olive oil, were asso­ci­ated with bet­ter cog­ni­tive func­tion and mem­ory, while sat­u­rated fats, the harm­ful fats found in ani­mal fats such as but­ter, were asso­ci­ated with worse over­all cog­ni­tive func­tion and mem­ory.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), a teach­ing affil­i­ate of Harvard Medical School ana­lyzed data from the Women’s Health Study, orig­i­nally a cohort of nearly 40,000 women, 45 years and older. The researchers used data from a sub­set of 6,000 women, all over the age of 65. The women par­tic­i­pated in three cog­ni­tive func­tion tests, which were spaced out every two years for an aver­age test­ing span of four years. These women also com­pleted a detailed food fre­quency ques­tion­naire at the start of the study.

The researchers found that although total fat did not appear to affect cog­ni­tive func­tion, the type of fat did. Women who con­sumed the high­est amounts of sat­u­rated fat, com­pared to those who con­sumed the low­est amounts, had worse over­all cog­ni­tion and mem­ory. Women who ate the most of the monoun­sat­u­rated fats, which can be found in olive oil, had bet­ter pat­terns of cog­ni­tive scores over time.

“Substituting the good fat in place of the bad fat is a fairly sim­ple dietary mod­i­fi­ca­tion that could help pre­vent decline in mem­ory,” noted Harvard’s Olivia Okereke.


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