Consuming Cranberries Daily Provides Memory Support, New Study Says

The natural tendency to forget things becomes more prevalent as we age. When it comes to healthy aging, proactively nurturing your brain health is important whether you're 20 or 80—and diet has a huge impact on cognitive outcomes.

The study's participants include 60 healthy older men and women between the ages of 50 and 80. Half consumed a daily freeze-dried cranberry powder equivalent to one small cup of cranberries while the control group was provided a placebo. 

Participants who received cranberry supplementation demonstrated significant improvements in visual episodic memory—i.e., the ability to remember details of what something looks like—when compared to the control group. 

Episodic memory is also associated with remembering the details of an event that happened earlier in one's life (think a first date, your wedding day, the birth of your child, etc.). This indicates that cranberries (and more specifically, polyphenols) play a large role in enhancing and sustaining memory later in life.

Researchers hypothesize these improvements in memory may be a result of increased blood flow to the entorhinal cortex—the gateway for information to enter and leave the hippocampus, where learning and memory formation occur.

These powerful phytonutrients are the reason we decided to include resveratrol—a polyphenol shown to improve verbal memory, cerebral blood flow, and overall cognitive function2—in our proactive brain health supplement, brain guard+.*