We all know that we should be getting our exercise.
After all, when you look at its immediate benefits alone, you’ll find that physical activity does everything from offering you a mood and energy boost to improving your sleep.
And beyond the instantaneous, getting your exercise is one of the best ways to improve your liver health to avoid fatty liver disease and get younger, healthier cells.
Exercise has even been shown to slow brain aging!
Yup, getting up and getting in your steps or your run, or simply dancing your way to fitness can dramatically improve your health.
And now, there’s one more reason to get active…
Research from a team of scientists at UC San Francisco is proving that staying active as you age could be the key to defeating Alzheimer’s.
Enhancing connections between brain cells
You see, according to their research — which is actually a combination of two separate studies — staying active as you age dramatically boosts the levels of a special class of proteins in your brain. These proteins are critical in maintaining connections between your brain cells in order to maintain healthy cognition.
Since those connections (or synapses) is where cognition happens and where damaging proteins associated with Alzheimer’s accumulate, it’s easy to see why keeping them at their best can keep your brain and cognition at their best.
In fact, the protective impact of those proteins was found even in people whose brains were riddled with the beta and tau proteins that go hand-in-hand with Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
The team was able to prove this by tracking the late-life physical activity of elderly participants, who also agreed to donate their brains when they died.
The researchers found that elderly people who remained active had higher levels of proteins that facilitate the exchange of information between neurons. This increased level of protective proteins was even noted in the hippocampus — the brain’s seat of memory.
And the researchers were able to prove that people who had more of these proteins in their brains when they died were better able to maintain their cognition late in life.
In other words, if you want to keep your cognition strong and the ravages of Alzheimer’s at bay, getting your exercise is a must.
Avoiding Alzheimer’s
And there’s even more you can do to keep Alzheimer’s from striking and stealing your precious memories.
My colleague, Joyce Hollman, has reported on six research-backed ways to avoid Alzheimer’s, no matter what your genes say.
And she’s even delved into four medicines that are already on the shelves of your local pharmacy that could stop the disease in its tracks.
Additionally, for a completely natural way to boost your memory by 15 percent, you can try this Mediterranean brain juice that incorporates the power of rosemary water.
Finally, be sure to have your vitamin D levels checked regularly to make sure you’re getting enough of this vitamin, which has been called a “dementia repellent”.
Sources:
Exercise alters brain chemistry to protect aging synapses — ScienceDaily