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terça-feira, 3 de fevereiro de 2015

BRAZIL NUT IMPROVES COGNITIVE FUNCTION IN ELDERLY PEOPLE




Does the scene reproduced above, keep occurring? A chestnut tree, which can produce 1000 kg of nuts per year, gives way to the cattle that will generate, at most, a few hundred pounds of meat per hectare/year.
The scene above shows a few Brazil nut trees left after deforestation. They will survive for less than twenty years! 
 Look at the results of the research on the effects of selenium on human health, as reported on DIÁRIO DA SAÚDE.


Selenium deficiency is compensated by daily consumption of just one from Brazil nut which  brings improvement of cognitive functions. USP (University of São Paulo) researchers found these effects working with elderly people with mild cognitive impairment (CCL, in Portuguese), considered an intermediate stage between normal aging and the dementias such as Alzheimer's disease.

The nutritionist Barbara Cardoso explains that the CCL (mild cognitive impairment) is characterized by cognitive loss (case involving attention, perception, memory, reasoning, judgment, imagination, thinking and language) higher than expected for his/her age.The analysis done by the nutritionist showed an association between levels of selenium and oxidative stress, excess free radicals compared with system protector of each cell-95% of seniors who participated in the research presented selenium deficiency.

For six months, the nutritionist accompanied two senior groups. The first ingested a Brazil nut per day and the other received no intervention. After the period, all participants in the group that consumed the daily nut did not present the selenium deficiency. The two groups were also submitted to neuropsychological assessment before and after intervention with the Brazil nuts, to assess factors such as verbal fluency, ability to copy drawings, recognition of figures, among others.

The results showed that the consumption of Brazil nuts mitigated the cognitive decline, with the group that ingested chestnut featuring systematically better results.

According to nutritionist, "just a Brazil nut supplies 288.75 micrograms of selenium daily, increasing the consumption of selenium in addition to the RDA (55 micrograms / day).

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