Vitamin B12 and Your Memory

November 6, 2010 by  
Filed under Build Mind Power

Vitamin B12The connection between Vitamin B12 and your memory may surprise you. And it could be three or more years before you realize your memory has been damaged because of a vitamin B12 deficiency.

Memory and Vitamin B12

Dr Jill Ammon-Wexler here.  A recent study published in Neurology demonstrated that Vitamin B12 is essential to protect your brain’s ability to avoid memory loss and have a sharp memory.

The research group first measured subjects’ vitamin B12 levels. Then they divided the research subjects into three groups based on vitamin B12 levels, and followed them for five years with annual brain scans and physical and mental examinations, including memory loss and performance tests.

Memory Damage Due to Low Vitamin B12 Levels

This is important: The group with the lowest levels of Vitamin B12 lost twice as much brain volume as those with the highest levels – regardless of their brain size, age, sex, education, cognitive test scores and blood chemistry.

In effect, their brains shrunk.

Why is Vitamin B12 Important to Memory?

Vitamin B12 is crucial to brain function and the overall health of your nervous system. Every cell in your body and brain uses it to convert fuel into energy. And your brain-based memory systems are no exception to this rule.

If you don’t get sufficient amounts of Vitamin B12, you could have poor nerve function, anemia, fatigue, diarrhea, and low resistance to infection  –  PLUS  a shrinking brain volume and memory loss.

The only natural sources of Vitamin B12 are meats, fish, dairy and eggs. And supplements are NOT the answer. For a more complete discussion of  ways to get Vitamin B12 into your diet, I suggest the website I have posted at the bottom of this post.

A Second Critical Factor

Equally critical to your physical and mental vitality is your ability to manage your thoughts.  The stress that results from the mental exhaustion, discouragement, loss of hope and low-level fear that has become so common today is now known to actually KILL BRAIN CELLS.

Only 10 to 15 minutes a day in the AMAZING Self Growth Planet’s brain gym can give you the emotional lift you need to better handle today’s intense challenges and protect your brain.  GO check it out and experience the difference for 10 days from only a buck: http://www.selfgrowthplanet.com

Posted by Jill Ammon-Wexler
Amazing Solutions

Don’t Invite Memory Loss

April 4, 2009 by  
Filed under Life Mastery

howadultAt one time or another nearly everyone over the age of 30 has received a birthday card joking about their declining memory or other common ailments of old age.

Now a study suggest that such negative portrayals of old age actually help bring about the  problems they joke about, such as  memory loss in old age.

In one part of the study Harvard University researcher Bacca Levy, Ph.D., asked volunteers aged 60 or over to press either the up or down arrow on a keyboard each time a word was flashed on a computer monitor. Some participants were shown words with negative connotations about aging, such as senile and incompetent, while other folks saw terms with more positive associations, such as wise or alert

Each word was visible for such a brief period of time–anywhere from a tenth to a twentieth of a second–that the participants couldn’t actually read them. Even so, subjects shown words that reinforced negative views of the erderly later performed more poorly on memory loss tests than folks who saw the positive words, Levy reports in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

So negative stereotypes may become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if we’re not conscious that we’ve been exposed to them. This shows how insidious our views of aging are, Levy says. Maybe it’s no coincidence that in an earlier cross-cultural study Levy found that views of aging are particularly positive in China–where elders far outperform their American counterparts on memory tests designed to measure memory loss in old age.